Five features of Portworx on AWS that provide data resilience
Here in this blog, we will learn about five features of Portworx on AWS that provide data resilience.
Using Portworx and Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization on Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA), users can dependably move their virtual machines to the cloud and still have access to all the enterprise-grade storage features they need to run their applications in production.
How does ROSA work?
Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA) is a managed implementation of Red Hat OpenShift on AWS that comes with a 99.95% service level agreement (SLA) and a dedicated Red Hat site reliability engineering (SRE) team to manage the environment on your behalf. The Red Hat SRE team guarantees that your ROSA cluster is deployed with best practices, helps bring up clusters using automation, and maintains uptime with round-the-clock global coverage. This keeps your Cloud Architects and DevOps team compliant with a fully supported open-source stack while relieving them of the maintenance, integration, and upgrade burden associated with Kubernetes.
With version 4.14, ROSA is an OpenShift version that is fully supported and allows the OpenShift Virtualization operator. The OpenShift Virtualization operator is customer-managed with full Red Hat support, while the Red Hat SRE team takes care of the management and upkeep of the ROSA cluster on your behalf.
ROSA-based OpenShift Virtualization
Hat in Red Based on KVM and Kubevirt, OpenShift Virtualization is a virtualization technology that is ready for production use. Using the OpenShift application platform, you can use OpenShift Virtualization to run a conventional, full virtual machine image of an operating system inside a container. The actual image is managed like a container with a shared network and YAML configuration file, even though it runs on a pod in a worker node. Images from Linux and Windows are supported. The service needs specialized hardware-based workers to run (AWS *.metal instances), and it can be installed using the OpenShift operator marketplace (OperatorHub). It supports OCP-Virt operator deployment on ROSA as of OpenShift 4.14 when you use dedicated hardware nodes in your worker pool.
See Managing Virtual Machines and Containers as Code with OpenShift Virtualization on Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS for more information on the advantages of using an AWS-managed OpenShift service.
Enterprise-class data management using Portworx for OpenShift Virtualization
Organizations expect the same enterprise-grade features and services that they were accustomed to when running virtual machines on-premises, now that ROSA supports OpenShift Virtualization on metal instances. This is where Portworx can help by offering the greatest data management and storage platform out there for OpenShift Virtualization. In this section, we’ll discuss how Portworx offers all the enterprise-grade features that users anticipate from their virtualization infrastructure, along with serving as the shared storage layer for virtual machines (VMs) and pods operating on ROSA clusters.
For Portworx to be installed on ROSA clusters, an existing VPC is required.
Many important features that Portworx offers for OpenShift Virtualization operating on ROSA clusters are as follows:
- Live Migration: This feature is crucial for administrators as it allows them to shift workloads between worker nodes. Administrators can move virtual machines (VMs) or applications between AWS Availability zones using the storage pool that Portworx offers as a safeguard against data center outages. Users can use Portworx to Live-migrate their virtual machines (VMs) across different worker nodes in their ROSA cluster, regardless of whether these worker nodes are operating in the same availability zone or across different availability zones within the same AWS region.
- High Availability: In the event of a node failure or an Availability Zone failure, users anticipate that virtual machines will restart and become available on a different worker node. Without user intervention, virtual machines (VMs) that are restarted across worker nodes or availability zones can mount the replica of the persistent volume running on the surviving node/AZ and continue serving user traffic thanks to Portworx and its native high availability feature.
- Automated Storage Capacity Management: You might be moving hundreds or even thousands of virtual machines to OpenShift Virtualization as part of your virtualization stack modernization. Keeping track of virtual machine disk usage and manually growing those disks throughout all of the VMs can turn into a full-time job. Your virtual machine disks’ Autopilot rules are configured by the rule-based engine of Portworx Autopilot. Disk usage is tracked by Portworx for each of your virtual machines. Portwork Autopilot executes an action specified in your Autopilot rule whenever a disk satisfies a configured condition. As a result, you may delegate the management of virtual machine disks to Portworx and concentrate on more important duties that genuinely benefit your company.
- Disaster Recovery: It goes without saying that you have a plan in place when you run applications in production. You can create a synchronous disaster recovery solution using Portworx Disaster Recovery (DR) that spans two distinct ROSA clusters operating in the same AWS region and has zero Recovery Point Objective (RPO) or data loss.
As an alternative, you can set up an asynchronous disaster recovery solution with a 15-minute RPO that spans two distinct ROSA clusters located in various AWS regions. When operating virtual machines on ROSA in AWS, you can plan for failure scenarios and create DR architectures with Portworx DR.
- Data protection: To handle non-failure scenarios like accidental deletion, data corruption, or ransomware attacks, you also need to be able to backup and restore a virtual machine running on ROSA. This is in addition to disaster recovery. You can attach your ROSA cluster to a backup instance that is either self-managed or Backup-as-a-Service via Portworx Backup. To safeguard your virtual machines and recover them to a different OpenShift or ROSA cluster with OpenShift Virtualization enabled, you can use Portworx Backup.
In brief
We’ve provided demonstrations that illustrate how Portworx can assist you in making OpenShift Virtualization on ROSA your next smart business move if you’d like to see some of these scenarios in action:
- Portworx and Kubernetes storage of the highest caliber for Red Hat OpenShift virtualization
- Data security methods utilizing Portworx Backup for KuberVirt virtual machines