Migrating Resources in a Cluster (Velero)

Application Scenarios

WordPress is used as an example to describe how to migrate an application from an on-premises Kubernetes cluster to a CCE cluster. The WordPress application consists of the WordPress and MySQL components, which are containerized. The two components are bound to two local storage volumes of the Local type respectively and provide external access through the NodePort Service.

Before the migration, use a browser to access the WordPress site, create a site named Migrate to CCE, and publish an article to verify the integrity of PV data after the migration. The article published in WordPress will be stored in the wp_posts table of the MySQL database. If the migration is successful, all contents in the database will be migrated to the new cluster. You can verify the PV data migration based on the migration result.

Prerequisites

Before the migration, clear the abnormal pod resources in the source cluster. If the pod is in the abnormal state and has a PVC mounted, the PVC is in the pending state after the cluster is migrated.
Ensure that the cluster on the CCE side does not have the same resources as the cluster to be migrated because Velero does not restore the same resources by default.
To ensure that container images can be properly pulled after cluster migration, migrate the images to SWR.
CCE does not support EVS disks of the ReadWriteMany type. If resources of this type exist in the source cluster, change the storage type to ReadWriteOnce.
Velero cannot back up or restore HostPath volumes. For details, see Limitations. To back up storage volumes of this type, replace the hostPath volumes with local volumes by referring toStorage Volumes of the HostPath Type Cannot Be Backed Up. If a backup task involves storage of the HostPath type, the storage volumes of this type will be automatically skipped and a warning message will be generated. This will not cause a backup failure.

Backing Up Applications in the Source Cluster

(Optional) To back up the data of a specified storage volume in the pod, add an annotation to the pod. The annotation template is as follows:
```
kubectl -n <namespace> annotate <pod/pod_name> backup.velero.io/backup-volumes=<volume_name_1>,<volume_name_2>,...
```
- <namespace>: namespace where the pod is located.
- <pod_name>: pod name.
- <volume_name>: name of the persistent volume mounted to the pod. You can run the describe statement to query the pod information. The Volume field indicates the names of all persistent volumes attached to the pod.
Add annotations to the pods of WordPress and MySQL. The pod names are wordpress-758fbf6fc7-s7fsr and mysql-5ffdfbc498-c45lh. As the pods are in the default namespace default, the -n <NAMESPACE> parameter can be omitted.
```
kubectl annotate pod/wordpress-758fbf6fc7-s7fsr backup.velero.io/backup-volumes=wp-storage
kubectl annotate pod/mysql-5ffdfbc498-c45lh backup.velero.io/backup-volumes=mysql-storage
```
Back up the application. During the backup, you can specify resources based on parameters. If no parameter is added, the entire cluster resources are backed up by default. For details about the parameters, see Resource filtering.
- --default-volumes-to-fs-backup: indicates that the PV backup tool is used to back up all storage volumes attached to a pod. HostPath volumes are not supported. If this parameter is not specified, the storage volume specified by annotation in 1 is backed up by default. This parameter is available only when --use-node-agent is specified during Velero installation.
```
velero backup create <backup-name> --default-volumes-to-fs-backup
```
- --include-namespaces: backs up resources in a specified namespace.
```
velero backup create <backup-name> --include-namespaces <namespace>
```
- --include-resources: backs up the specified resources.
```
velero backup create <backup-name> --include-resources deployments
```
- --selector: backs up resources that match the selector.
```
velero backup create <backup-name> --selector <key>=<value>
```
In this section, resources in the namespace default are backed up. wordpress-backup is the backup name. Specify the same backup name when restoring applications. An example is as follows:
```
velero backup create wordpress-backup --include-namespaces default --default-volumes-to-fs-backup
```
If the following information is displayed, the backup task is successfully created:
```
Backup request "wordpress-backup" submitted successfully. 
Run `velero backup describe wordpress-backup` or `velero backup logs wordpress-backup` for more details.
```

Check the backup status.

velero backup get

Information similar to the following is displayed:

NAME               STATUS      ERRORS   WARNINGS   CREATED                         EXPIRES   STORAGE LOCATION   SELECTOR
wordpress-backup   Completed   0        0          2021-10-14 15:32:07 +0800 CST   29d       default            <none>

In addition, you can go to the object bucket to view the backup files. The backups path is the application resource backup path, and the other is the PV data backup path.

Click to enlarge

Restoring Applications in the Target Cluster

The storage infrastructure of an on-premises cluster is different from that of a cloud cluster. After the cluster is migrated, PVs cannot be mounted to pods. Therefore, during the migration, update the storage class of the target cluster to shield the differences of underlying storage interfaces between the two clusters when creating a workload and request storage resources of the corresponding type. For details, see Updating the Storage Class. If you migrate storage by using Object Storage Migration Service (OMS), you can mount object storage buckets to pods by referring to Using an Existing OBS Bucket Through a Static PV.

Use kubectl to connect to the CCE cluster. Create a storage class with the same name as that of the source cluster.

In this example, the storage class name of the source cluster is local and the storage type is local disk. Local disks completely depend on the node availability. The data DR performance is poor. When the node is unavailable, the existing storage data is affected. Therefore, EVS volumes are used as storage resources in CCE clusters, and SAS disks are used as backend storage media.
- When an application containing PV data is restored in a CCE cluster, the defined storage class dynamically creates and mounts storage resources (such as EVS volumes) based on the PVC.
- The storage resources of the cluster can be changed as required, not limited to EVS volumes. To mount other types of storage, such as file storage and object storage, see Updating the Storage Class.
YAML file of the migrated cluster:
```
apiVersion: storage.k8s.io/v1
kind: StorageClass
metadata:
  name: local
provisioner: kubernetes.io/no-provisioner
volumeBindingMode: WaitForFirstConsumer
```
The following is an example of the YAML file of the migration cluster:
```
allowVolumeExpansion: true
apiVersion: storage.k8s.io/v1
kind: StorageClass
metadata:
  name: local
  selfLink: /apis/storage.k8s.io/v1/storageclasses/csi-disk
parameters:
  csi.storage.k8s.io/csi-driver-name: disk.csi.everest.io
  csi.storage.k8s.io/fstype: ext4
  everest.io/disk-volume-type: SAS
  everest.io/passthrough: "true"
provisioner: everest-csi-provisioner
reclaimPolicy: Delete
volumeBindingMode: Immediate  
```
Use the Velero tool to create a restore and specify a backup named wordpress-backup to restore the WordPress application to the CCE cluster.
```
velero restore create --from-backup wordpress-backup
```
You can run the velero restore get statement to view the application restoration status.
After the restoration is complete, check whether the application is running properly. If other adaptation problems may occur, rectify the fault by following the procedure described in Updating Resources Accordingly.