Backing up and restoring with IBM Storage Fusion

IBM® Storage Fusion and its recipes provide a fully automated solution for backing up and restoring Maximo® Application Suite.

Before you begin

You can use IBM® Storage Fusion with recipes for backing up and restoring Maximo Application Suite. There are a few considerations when looking at IBM Storage Fusion:
  • The recipes identify the components and perform the backup.
  • It provides a cohesive end to end automated backup capability, which is different from the ansible automations
  • It offers the IBM Storage Fusion user interface and scheduling capabilities
  • It is more suited for enterprise usage where multiple clusters need to be managed.
  • If you have other IBM products such as IBM Cloud Pak for Data, with DB2, then IBM Storage Fusion already has recipes for this.
  • It does not backup external databases, those that are outside of the OpenShift cluster.
  • IBM Storage Fusion requires additional resources which can either be in the cluster or in another cluster.
  • IBM Storage Fusion license provided with Maximo Application Suite does not include backup and restore, so additional license needs to be acquired.
You must have the following software:
  • Maximo Application Suite version 8.11 and later.
  • Maximo Manage
    • Make sure that the production storage that is hosting Maximo Application Suite and Maximo Manage is Container Storage Interface (CSI) compatible. For more information, see Fusion System Requirements.
  • IBM Storage Fusion 2.8.x.
    • The license for Maximo Application Suite provides access to IBM Storage Fusion for internal deployment mode only. This excludes disaster recovery, backup components, data cataloging, and advanced encryption with KMS. You can also upgrade your license. For more information, see IBM Terms > License information.

About this task

IBM Storage Fusion is the leading storage solution for Red Hat® OpenShift®. For more information, see IBM Storage Fusion.

Procedure

  1. Install IBM Storage Fusion 2.8.x.
    1. Get the entitlement key.
      For more information, see Obtaining entitlement key.
    2. Create an image pull secret.
      For more information, see Creating image pull secret.
    3. Install the IBM Storage Fusion Operator and deploy IBM Storage Fusion.
      Follow the specific instructions based on your type of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform deployment. For more information, see Deploying IBM Storage Fusion.
    4. Deploy the IBM Storage Fusion backup and restore service.
      For more information, see IBM Storage Fusion Backup & Restore.
  2. From the IBM Storage Fusion user interface, configure general backup and restore.
    1. Create a backup storage location.
      Backup storage location
      The object storage where backups are stored.
      It can be any S3 compatible storage or Microsoft Azure Blob storage.
      For more information, see Backup storage locations.
    2. Create a backup policy.
      Backup policy
      Defines the frequency, the retention period, and the location of the backups.
      For more information, see Creating backup policy.
  3. Configure the specific IBM Storage Fusion recipes for Maximo Application Suite backup and restore.
    For more information, see Using Maximo Fusion Recipes.

Restoring Maximo Application Suite with IBM Storage Fusion

You can restore to the same Red Hat OpenShift cluster or a different Red Hat OpenShift cluster.

Before you begin

  • The target namespaces must be the same.
  • The target namespaces must be empty.

Procedure

  1. Restore the Maximo Application Suite platform instance.
    1. In the IBM Storage Fusion user interface, specify Use the same project the application is already using.
      For more information, see Restoring an application with IBM Storage Fusion Software.
    IBM Storage Fusion reinstalls the Maximo Application Suite platform instance, restores the data, and recovers the instance to a working state.
  2. Optional: From the IBM Storage Fusion user interface, restore to a spoke cluster.
    1. Establish a connection between the hub and spoke clusters.
      Generate a connection snippet form the hub cluster and copy it. For more information, see Establishing connection between hub and spoke.
    2. On the hub cluster, start the installation.
    3. On the spoke cluster, select where the recipe needs to be deployed.
    For more information, see IBM Storage Fusion>Backup & Restore.