Considerations and Limitations

When you plan to deploy and configure the solution, keep in mind the following limitations and considerations.

Backup Infrastructure

When configuring Veeam Plug-in for KubeVirt, consider the following:

• You cannot connect the same Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization cluster to multiple backup servers.
• You cannot connect Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization clusters that operate on the Upstream Kubernetes Code.
• Your backup server must not be connected to the pod network.
• Veeam Plug-in for KubeVirt supports Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization deployments installed with the OpenShift Virtualization Operator only.
• For the list of supported platform and Veeam Backup & Replication versions, see System Requirements. You can add clusters that run other versions, but Veeam Customer Support does not cover such configurations.
• You can deploy Veeam Plug-in for KubeVirt under the existing OpenShift Virtualization Engine subscription.
• Veeam Plug-in for KubeVirt does not support Red Hat OpenShift Local clusters. OpenShift Local is intended for development and testing only.
• Each Veeam Plug-in for KubeVirt instance represents one Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization cluster in Veeam Backup & Replication. You can deploy only one Veeam Plug-in for KubeVirt instance in a cluster.
• You can connect one backup server to multiple Veeam Plug-in for KubeVirt instances. Connecting multiple backup servers to the same Veeam Plug-in for KubeVirt instance is not supported.
• It is recommended that you use certificates issued by a certificate authority (CA) for the route that exposes Veeam Plug-in for KubeVirt. The backup server must trust the certificate of the route.
• By default, Veeam Backup & Replication connects to Veeam Plug-in for KubeVirt through an OpenShift route. If you do not use the route, you must expose the host and port of Veeam Plug-in for KubeVirt service to the backup server.
• The backup server must be able to establish a direct IP connection to the route that exposes Veeam Plug-in for KubeVirt. Connections through NAT gateways are not supported.
• Do not delete or re-create the namespace in which Veeam Plug-in for KubeVirt is installed, and do not modify resources in this namespace.
• Do not delete or rename the vkp service account, and do not change its credentials. Otherwise, Veeam Backup & Replication loses the connection to the Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization cluster, and you must add Veeam Plug-in for KubeVirt connection again.
• You can protect the same Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization cluster with Veeam Plug-in for KubeVirt and Veeam Kasten. To avoid conflicts, schedule the backup operations of these products so that they do not create snapshots of the same volumes at the same time.

Storage

When planning storage for Veeam Plug-in for KubeVirt, consider the following:

• Veeam Plug-in for KubeVirt supports only persistent volumes that use the Block volume mode.
• The CSI driver that provisions the volumes must support volume snapshots of block-mode volumes.
• Veeam KubeVirt Proxy uses annotations of storage classes and volume snapshot classes to select the classes for backup and restore operations. For Ceph RBD, you must annotate the storage class as described in section Installing Veeam KubeVirt Proxy.

VM Backup

When backing up VM data, consider the following:

• Veeam Plug-in for KubeVirt does not support backup of VMs with TPM or EFI persistence enabled.
• Veeam Plug-in for KubeVirt does not support backup of VMs with a network attachment definition configured.
• To ensure better performance, it is recommended that you distribute VMs evenly across Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization clusters and namespaces.
• Veeam Plug-in for KubeVirt does not support backup of VMs with persistent volumes that use the Filesystem volume mode.
• Veeam Plug-in for KubeVirt does not support backup of VMs with shared volumes, volumes attached as CD-ROM or volumes with the ReadOnlyMany access mode.
• Veeam Plug-in for KubeVirt does not support backup of VMs with persistent volume claims (PVCs) whose names are longer than 128 characters.

• Veeam Plug-in for KubeVirt does not support backup of VMs with secure boot or BitLocker enabled.
• Veeam Plug-in for KubeVirt does not support backup and restore of config maps, secrets and service accounts.
• Veeam Plug-in for KubeVirt processes VM data with two parallelism settings:

• Data mover parallelism — the number of data movers that run simultaneously. You configure this setting in the Veeam Backup & Replication console.
• Volume parallelism — the number of volumes that each data mover processes simultaneously. You configure this setting in the JSON configuration settings.

VM Restore

When restoring VM data, consider the following:

• Veeam Plug-in for KubeVirt does not support restore of labels and annotations from Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization clusters to the clusters of other platforms.

• During VM restore from another platform to Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, Veeam Plug-in for KubeVirt converts SCSI disk drivers to SATA. To convert the drivers back to the original standard, it is recommended that you install and enable VirtIO drivers on Windows-based VMs and VMs running minimal or customized Linux images (such as Alpine Linux).

• If a restore operation requires removing an existing VM (for example, when restoring a VM to the original location or overwriting a conflicting VM), the disks attached to this VM are only removed from the cluster if they have a direct ownership link (ownerReference) to that VM. Otherwise, these disks are retained in the cluster as orphaned resources. For more information on disk ownership, see Kubernetes documentation.
• [Applies to restore of Linux-based VMs] If the host name is not provided in the VM specification or the /etc/hostname file of the guest OS, Veeam Plug-in for KubeVirt sets the hostname of the restored VM to the name of the VM resource.