Not your grandfather's VMs: Renewing backup for Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization

Not your grandfather's VMs: Renewing backup for Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization Why old backup models break A solution for a modern platform Protect your investment, achieve resilience Further discovery 15 reasons to adopt Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization About the author Shane Heroux More like this Blog post Blog post Keep exploring Browse by channel Automation Artificial intelligence Open hybrid cloud Security Edge computing Infrastructure Applications Virtualization Share Maybe you’re planning your migration right now, or you’ve done it (congratulations!) Joining industry leaders in the strategic move to Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization gives you the best of both worlds: The operational familiarity of a virtual machine (VM) combined with the agility and scalability of a Kubernetes-native platform. You're running critical workloads in a modern, efficient way. But have you stopped to ask the crucial question: "How are we protecting them?" If your answer involves traditional, hypervisor-level backup tools, you might have a significant gap in your data protection strategy. The simple truth is that a VM running on OpenShift is fundamentally different from one on a legacy hypervisor, and it demands a modern approach to backup and recovery. In a traditional virtualization stack, a VM is a relatively self-contained unit. Backing it up usually meant taking an agent-based or hypervisor-level snapshot of a VMDK or VHDX file on a datastore. Simple enough. But in OpenShift Virtualization, a VM is much more than a virtual disk file. It's a composite application defined by a collection of interdependent Kubernetes resources. This includes the VirtualMachineInstance (VMI) itself, its DataVolumes and PersistentVolumeClaims (PVCs), along with associated ConfigMaps , Secrets , and network services that allow it to function. VirtualMachineInstance DataVolumes PersistentVolumeClaims ConfigMaps Secrets Backing up only the persistent volume is like saving your car's engine but throwing away the chassis, wheels, and control system. You have a critical component, but you can't actually rebuild the car.