Schedule migrations for synchronous DR in Tanzu

Once your source and destination clusters are paired, you need to create a schedule to migrate one or more namespaces periodically. Because you have only one Portworx cluster stretched across your source and destination clusters, you will only migrate Kubernetes resources and not your volumes.

note

If you are using Stork version 24.2.0 or later, when you create a migration schedule in the source cluster, Stork automatically creates a corresponding migration schedule in the destination cluster. This migration schedule is used as a reference during the failover operation, and you must not manipulate this migration schedule on the destination cluster.

Create a schedule policy on your source cluster

You have two options for creating a schedule policy:

• Run the storkctl create migrationschedule command-line tool the along with the required flags. See Create schedule policy with storkctl topic for more information about the commands with examples, or
• Perform the following steps on your source cluster:

To schedule the migration, you need to define a schedule policy. You can choose between two types: SchedulePolicy or NamespacedSchedulePolicy.

• SchedulePolicy: This policy is cluster-scoped and applies to the entire cluster.
• NamespacedSchedulePolicy: This policy is namespace-scoped and applies only to the namespace that is specified in the policy spec.

Perform the following steps on your source cluster to create a schedule policy:

1. Create a spec file using one of the following methods.

   • For SchedulePolicy, create the following spec file:

   apiVersion: stork.libopenstorage.org/v1alpha1
   kind: SchedulePolicy
   metadata:
     name: <your-schedule-policy>
   policy:
     interval:
       intervalMinutes: 30   

   For a list of parameters that you can use to create a schedule policy, see the Schedule Policy page.

   • For NamespacedSchedulePolicy, create the following spec file:

   apiVersion: stork.libopenstorage.org/v1alpha1
   kind: NamespacedSchedulePolicy
   metadata:
     name: <your-schedule-policy>
     namespace: <migrationnamespace>
   policy:
     interval:
       intervalMinutes: 30  

   For a list of parameters that you can use to create a namespaced policy, you can use the fields described on the Schedule Policy page, replacing SchedulePolicy with NamespacedSchedulePolicy.

   • You can also use the schedule policies that are installed by default. Run the storkctl get schedulepolicy command to get the list of these policies, then specify a policy name in the next section for creating a migration schedule. You can skip the next step if you are using the default policies, as they are already applied to your cluster.

2. Apply your policy on the source cluster:

   kubectl apply -f <your-schedule-policy>.yaml

3. Verify if the policy has been created:

   storkctl get schedulepolicy <your-schedule-policy>

   NAME                      INTERVAL-MINUTES    DAILY     WEEKLY             MONTHLY
   <your-schedule-policy>          30             N/A       N/A                N/A

Create a migration schedule on your source cluster

Once a policy has been created, you can use it to schedule migrations.

You have two options for creating a migration schedule:

• Run the storkctl create migrationschedule command-line tool the along with the required flags. See Create migration schedule with storkctl topic for more information about the commands with examples, or
• Perform the following steps on your source cluster:

1. Copy and paste the following spec into a file called migrationschedule.yaml. Modify the following spec to use a different migration schedule name and/or namespace. Ensure that the clusterPair name is correct.

   apiVersion: stork.libopenstorage.org/v1alpha1
   kind: MigrationSchedule
   metadata:
     name: migrationschedule
     namespace: <migrationnamespace> 
   spec:
     template:
       spec:
         clusterPair: <your-clusterpair-name>
         includeResources: true
         startApplications: false
         includeVolumes: false
         namespaces:
         - <app-namespace1>
         - <app-namespace2>
     schedulePolicyName: <your-schedule-policy>
     suspend: false
     autoSuspend: true

note

• The option startApplications must be set to false in the spec to ensure that the application pods do not start on the remote cluster when the Kubernetes resources are being migrated.
• The option includeVolumes is set to false because the volumes are already present on the destination cluster as this is a single Portworx cluster.
• With Stork 23.2 or newer, you can set the autoSuspend flag to true, as shown in the above spec. In case of a disaster, this will suspend the DR migration schedules automatically on your source cluster, and you will be able to migrate your application to an active Kubernetes cluster. If you are using an older version of Stork, refer to the Failover an application page for achieving failover for your application.

2. Apply your migrationschedule.yaml by entering the following command:

kubectl apply -f migrationschedule.yaml

If the policy name is missing or invalid there will be events logged against the schedule object. Success and failures of the migrations created by the schedule will also result in events being logged against the object. These events can be seen by running a kubectl describe command on the object.

Check your migration status

1. Run the following command on your source cluster to check the status of your migration:

storkctl get migration -n <migrationnamespace>

NAMESPACE                      NAME                                                                CLUSTERPAIR                STAGE   STATUS       VOLUMES   RESOURCES   CREATED               ELAPSED                          TOTAL BYTES TRANSFERRED
bidirectional-clusterpair-ns   <your-app>-migration-schedule-interval-interval-2023-08-28-015917   birectional-cluster-pair   Final   Successful   1/1       4/4         27 Aug 23 19:59 MDT   Volumes (33s) Resources (1m2s)   4096

• The output above indicates a successful migration in the Status column. It also provides a list of migration objects along with timestamps associated with your migration.

• You can also run the kubectl describe migration -n <migrationnamespace> to check details about specific migrations.

1. Verify your application and associated resources have been migrated by running the following command on your destination cluster:

kubectl get all -n zookeeper

  NAME                      TYPE        CLUSTER-IP     EXTERNAL-IP   PORT(S)    AGE
  service/zk-service        ClusterIP   10.xxx.xx.68   <none>        xxxx/TCP   2m13s

  NAME                       READY   UP-TO-DATE   AVAILABLE   AGE
  deployment.apps/zk         0/0     0            0           2m13s

  NAME                               DESIRED   CURRENT   READY   AGE
  replicaset.apps/zk-59d878d987      0         0         0       2m13s

This confirms that the respective namespace has been created and the applications (for example, Zookeeper) are installed. However, the application pods will not be not running because they are running on the source cluster.

note

As part of every Migration, Stork will also migrate the Kubernetes resources associated with your applications. For a successful migration, these applications need to be in a scaled down state on the destination side so that subsequent migrations from the same schedule can run to completion. To achieve this Stork will leverage spec.replicas from most of the standard Kubernetes controllers such as Deployments, StatefulSets, and so on. However, for applications managed by an Operator an ApplicationRegistration CR needs to be created which provides Stork with the necessary information required to perform a scale down of the application. Refer to the ApplicationRegistrations page for more details.