Chapter 1. Introduction to undercloud and control plane back up and restore

The Undercloud and Control Plane Back Up and Restore procedure provides steps for backing up the state of the Red Hat OpenStack Platform 16.0 undercloud and overcloud Controller nodes, hereinafter referred to as control plane nodes, before updates and upgrades. Use the procedure to restore the undercloud and the overcloud control plane nodes to their previous state if an error occurs during an update or upgrade.

1.1. Background

The Undercloud and Control Plane Back Up and Restore procedure uses the open source Relax and Recover (ReaR) disaster recovery solution, written in Bash. ReaR creates a bootable image consisting of the latest state of an undercloud or a Control Plane node. ReaR also enables a system administrator to select files for backup.

ReaR supports numerous boot media formats, including:

  • ISO
  • USB
  • eSATA
  • PXE

The examples in this document were tested using the ISO boot format.

ReaR can transport the boot images using multiple protocols, including:

  • HTTP/HTTPS
  • SSH/SCP
  • FTP/SFTP
  • NFS
  • CIFS (SMB)

For the purposes of backing up and restoring the Red Hat OpenStack Platform 16.0 undercloud and overcloud Control Plane nodes, the examples in this document were tested using NFS.

1.2. Backup management options

ReaR can use both internal and external backup management options.

Internal backup management

Internal backup options include:

  • tar
  • rsync

External backup management

External backup management options include both open source and proprietary solutions. Open source solutions include:

  • Bacula
  • Bareos

Proprietary solutions include:

  • EMC NetWorker (Legato)
  • HP DataProtector
  • IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM)
  • Symantec NetBackup