Velero Plugins for vSphere

First Tips

Please place the git repo under $GOPATH/src/github.com/vmware-tanzu/velero-plugin-for-vsphere.

Kinds of Plugins

Velero currently supports the following kinds of plugins:

• Block Store - creates snapshots from volumes (during a backup) and volumes from snapshots (during a restore).

Building the plugin

To build the plugin, run

$ make

To build the image, run

$ make container

This builds an image tagged as velero/velero-plugin-for-vsphere. If you want to specify a different name, run

$ make container IMAGE=your-repo/your-name:here

Deploying the plugins

To deploy your plugin image to an Velero server:

1. In the CSI setup, it is required to use the hostNetwork option for the deployment. Run kubectl patch deploy/velero -n velero --patch "$(cat deployment/patch-deployment-hostNetwork.yaml)".
2. Make sure your image is pushed to a registry that is accessible to your cluster's nodes.
3. Run velero plugin add <image>, e.g. velero plugin add velero/vsphere-plugin-for-velero

Using the plugins

When the plugin is deployed, it is only made available to use. To make the plugin effective, you must modify your configuration:

Volume snapshot storage:

1. Run kubectl edit volumesnapshotlocation <location-name> -n <velero-namespace> e.g. kubectl edit volumesnapshotlocation default -n velero OR velero snapshot-location create <location-name> --provider <provider-name>
2. Change the value of spec.provider to enable a Block Store plugin
3. Save and quit. The plugin will be used for the next backup/restore

HOWTO

To run with the plugin, do the following:

1. Run velero snapshot-location create example-default --provider velero.io/vsphere

2. Run kubectl edit deployment/velero -n <velero-namespace>

3. Change the value of spec.template.spec.args to look like the following:

         - args:
           - server
           - --default-volume-snapshot-locations
           - velero.io/vsphere:example-default

   Note: users can also run kubectl apply -f deployment/create-deployment-for-plugin.yaml to configure the deployment for the plugin, which is equivalent to steps 1 - 3 mentioned above.

4. Run kubectl apply -f examples/demo-app.yaml to apply a sample nginx application that uses the example block store plugin. Note: This example works best on a virtual machine, as it uses the host's /tmp directory for data storage.