Decoupling of NetBackup Policy and Job Management from primary server
In Cloud Scale Technology, policy execution and job management (NBPEM and NBJM) is implemented as StatefulSet which can be deployed through the operators. Policy and job management capabilities are decoupled from the primary server and run as separate service in Kubernetes cluster.
NBPEM/NBJM is dependent on primary, web services and mqbroker pods. NBPEM/NBJM cluster comprises of one or more policyjobmgr pods and one or more policyjob pods. StatefulSet policyjobmgr represents the leaders whereas StatefulSet policyjob is associated with the followers. You can consider adding a secondary leader to guarantee continuous job execution if the primary leader is unavailable.
Note:
In the above figure, is a decoupled component. For more information refer to Decoupling of NetBackup web services from primary server.
A NBPEM/NBJM pod consists of the following containers:
The main container for core policy and job management
PBX sidecar
Vnetd sidecar
Fluentbit sidecar
Housekeeping sidecar
The nbpemreq (NetBackup Policy Execution Manager Requisition) command shows the distribution of policy/clients across the follower pods.
For Cloud Scale, it is recommended to run the nbpemreq command on the primary pod or on the policyjob leader.
It is recommended to use -M option with the pod name to direct the request to the specific pod. When -M option is not specified, the default target is one of the leaders.
For more information on nbpemreq command, refer to the NetBackup™ Commands Reference Guide.
Multiplexing (MPX): MPX is not supported in NBPEM/NBJM scale-out environment.
Supporting MPX in any format could lead to unpredictable/unexpected/undesired behaviors. Hence it is recommended to disable the MPX support.
Session end and catalog backup: For scale-out deployments (Kubernetes cluster), session end catalog backup schedules are not supported.
For non scale-out deployments, session end catalog backup schedules and persistence would be moved to a Json formatted file.
Secondary leader: The secondary leader's role is limited to forwarding media server calls to the follower pods. All communication from the media server is load balanced between primary and secondary leaders, ensuring uninterrupted job execution in case the primary leader is unavailable.
Scale-out/Scale-in:
Auto-scaling is not supported. However, manual scaling of follower and leader is allowed.
By default, Cloud Scale starts with a single follower pod; you can scale this out up to a maximum of 12 pods.
By default, Cloud Scale starts with a single leader pod; you can scale this out up to a maximum of 6 pods.
Warning:
The users are advised to scale out the leader and follower services only if necessary, as this would consume more resources.
Run the following command to control the follower replica count:
helm upgrade cloudscale cloudscale-11.2-xxx.tgz -n <namespace> --reuse-values --set environment.primary.replicas.policyjob=<count>
Run the following command to control the leader replica count:
helm upgrade cloudscale cloudscale-11.2-xxx.tgz -n <namespace> --reuse-values --set environment.primary.replicas.policyjobmgr=<count>