Validated Patterns

RamenDR Starter Kit

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Sandbox Sandbox
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RamenDR Regional Disaster Recovery with Virtualization Starter Kit

This pattern sets up three clusters as recommended for OpenShift Data Foundations Regional Disaster Recovery as documented here.

Of additional interest is that the workload that it sets up protection for and can failover involves running virtual machines.

The setup process is relatively intricate; the goal of this pattern is to handle all the intricate parts and present a functional DR-capable starting point for Virtual Machine workloads. In particular this pattern takes care to sequence installations and validate pre-requisites for all of the core components of the Disaster Recovery system.

In particular, this pattern must be customized to specify DNS basedomains for the managed clusters, which makes forking the pattern (which we generally recommend anyway, in case you want to make other customizations) effectively a requirement. The Getting Started doc has details on what needs to be changed and how to commit and push those changes.

Background

It would be ideal if all applications in the world understood availability concepts natively and had their own integrated regional failover strategies. However, many workloads do not, and users who need regional disaster recovery capabilities need to solve this problem for the applications that cannot solve it for themselves.

This pattern uses OpenShift Virtualization (the productization of Kubevirt) to simulate the Edge environment for VMs.

Solution elements

Red Hat Technologies

  • Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform (Kubernetes)

  • Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management (RHACM)

  • Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundations (ODF, including Multicluster Orchestrator)

  • Submariner (VPN)

  • Red Hat OpenShift GitOps (ArgoCD)

  • OpenShift Virtualization (Kubevirt)

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 (on the VMs)

Other technologies this pattern Uses

  • HashiCorp Vault (Community Edition)

  • External Secrets Operator (Community Edition)

Architecture

ramendr-starter-kit-architecture
Figure 1. RamenDR Starter Kit Architecture