Nutanix CE : Using Rubrik for Backup

Background

There we go, you have been able to deploy a Nutanix CE instance for your lab/testing environment. You would like to set some backups up ? You also have some Rubrik deployment and you would like to take benefit of this environment ? This is totally making sense but you cannot add your CE cluster because of the AOS version incompatibility ? There is a way to overcome this - at your own risks !

Tweaking the Lab

This time, we do not touch CE, it works well and it is completely agnostic to any backup or API calls that take place in the background. Let's go on the Rubrik side. I apologize but you need to have access to your brik with the rksupport account.

When adding a new AHV Cluster (yes, CE is using AHV) on a Rubrik environment, there is a version check that confirms if the target is part of the support matrix. Of course, CE is not.

The configuration variable is called nutanixOsVersionRegexCheck and the default value is :

rksupport@VRVW4xxxxxx4F:~$ rubrik_tool.py get_config nutanix nutanixOsVersionRegexCheck

"^(5\\.(8|6|5|1\\.[1-5])(\\..*)?|2017\\..*|2018\\.0[1-4]\\.[0-9]{2})$"

Current CE version is returning 2018.05.01 which is not a match with the above. To correct this, simply update the matching version check with the below statement (which is now a match) :

rksupport@VRVW4xxxxxx4F:~$ rubrik_tool.py update_config nutanix nutanixOsVersionRegexCheck "(5\\.(8|6|5|1\\.[1-5])(\\..*)?|2017\\..*|2018\\.0[1-4]\\.[0-9]{2})|2018\\.05\\.01$"

Now, you can add the CE cluster on your brik. Rubrik will send API calls to the CE cluster as it did on the commercial Nutanix product.

Security wise, you need to take care of the below tcp ports, be sure they are open otherwise Rubrik won't be able to transfer the snapshots (iSCSI protocol).

Source	Port	Target
Rubrik Node(s)	tcp/9440	Nutanix vIP
Rubrik Node(s)	tcp/860 tcp/3205 tcp/3260	Nutanix Data Services IP Nutanix CVM(s)

Now, this is time to add VMs into a SLA and start backups. If all above is ok (especially the tcp ports opening, you should be successful.

Now, we need to understand what we are doing, Nutanix CE is for test purpose ONLY and should not take production workloads of any kind. Changing the Rubrik RegEx variable is tricky too and you need to know what you are doing. If something is broken, this is at your own risks. I suggest to make this changes on a Rubrik EDGE VM and not on a physical cluster.

This aspect been taken apart, now imagine what can be done : restoring a production VM on a CE cluster ... woaw ... even try the opposite ? ;) you are testing workloads on CE and restore/export them on the production cluster .... I trust you to find any appropriate fun usage of this.

I can confirm that this is possible to do a snapshot of a CE VM and restore it to a Production Nutanix AHV cluster without any problem. Now, up to you to find your use cases.

Enjoy!