My name is Kevin Jackson. I have been working with OpenStack since the first releases in various capacities — as an operator, author, architect, and currently at Trilio, where I assist organisations with cloud backup and recovery strategies. Over the years, I have watched OpenStack mature from an early-stage project into the core infrastructure underpinning demanding private and public clouds across telecoms, financial services, and the public sector. Few platforms bear such operational weight or the responsibility of safeguarding the workloads running upon them.
During my time at Trilio, having participated in numerous discussions with engineers and architects, a consistent set of queries routinely emerges. This is to be expected; while specific phrasing adapts alongside new OpenStack releases and evolving product capabilities, the core operational concerns remain largely unchanged.
We have compiled this FAQ to address those recurring questions, and we will maintain it as new considerations arise and the technology develops. The document is split into two sections: a general overview for those exploring OpenStack data protection concepts, followed by a deeper technical breakdown specific to Trilio.
Whether you are deploying your initial OpenStack environment or managing established production infrastructure for an enterprise, the objective here is simple: to provide the practical information required to protect virtual machines, volumes, and network configurations effectively.
Generic OpenStack Backup Questions, Included Here to Help You Get Started
Q: What is OpenStack backup?
A: OpenStack backup is the process of creating copies of your tenant workloads – including virtual machines, Cinder volumes, network topology, security groups, and other metadata – so they can be restored in the event of data loss, corruption, or a disaster. Done properly, it isn’t just about the disk. It’s about being able to bring an entire, functioning workload back to life. An important aspect to consider: backup is easy, correct restore is complex. Trilio correctly handles recovery to any OpenStack cloud, using orchestrated calls to OpenStack. Don’t be fooled by generic backup and restore tools that leaves holes in your OpenStack backup and restore strategies.
Q: Why are OpenStack backups important?
A: OpenStack is frequently the foundation for business-critical, multi-tenant private and public clouds across telecommunications, financial services, government, and enterprise IT. Without a reliable backup and recovery strategy, a single misconfiguration, a failed upgrade, or an infrastructure failure can mean extended downtime, or permanent data loss, across an entire tenant or project. In environments where five-nines uptime isn’t a nice-to-have but a contractual obligation, that risk simply isn’t acceptable.
Q: What are the different types of OpenStack backups?
A: Broadly speaking, OpenStack workloads can be protected in a few different ways:
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Snapshot-based backups use the underlying storage platform (such as Ceph) to create fast, point-in-time copies of volumes.
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Full backups capture the complete state of a workload: VMs, Cinder volumes, network topology, and metadata, at a given point in time.
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Incremental backups capture only the data that has changed since the last backup, reducing storage consumption and shortening backup windows.
Q: How do I choose the right OpenStack backup strategy?
A: It comes down to your recovery point objectives (RPOs), your recovery time objectives (RTOs), the criticality of the workloads involved, and where you need your backups to live – on-premises, in another region, or in the public cloud. In multi-tenant clouds, you also need to think carefully about governance: who is allowed to back up and restore which projects, and under what circumstances.
Q: How do I implement an OpenStack backup solution?
A: Implementing OpenStack backup successfully comes down to five steps:
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Choose a backup tool that integrates natively with OpenStack and supports your chosen distribution: Red Hat OpenStack, Canonical, Kolla-Ansible, Mirantis, OpenStack-Ansible, or other upstream OpenStack distros.
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Define backup policies that specify frequency, retention, and which projects or workloads are in scope.
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Choose a storage target — on-premises NFS/S3, or a public cloud object store.
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Schedule and monitor backups so jobs run automatically and failures are surfaced quickly, not discovered during an outage.
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Test restores regularly to confirm that workloads, networking, and metadata all come back correctly – not just the disk.
Q: What are some best practices for OpenStack backup and recovery?
A: A few I always emphasize with customers:
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Back up more than just the disk: A VM is only truly recoverable if its network topology, security groups, and metadata come back with it.
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Test your restores: A backup you’ve never restored is a hope, not a plan.
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Automate wherever possible: Manual backup processes simply don’t scale in multi-tenant environments.
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Keep pace with your OpenStack or Distro’s releases: Make sure your backup solution is validated against the OpenStack version and distribution you’re actually running.
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Trilio-Specific OpenStack Backup Questions
Q: What is Trilio for OpenStack?
A: Trilio for OpenStack is a native, agentless, multi-tenant backup and recovery solution built specifically for OpenStack clouds. It provides:
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Application-centric backups that capture everything needed to recover an entire workload — VMs, Cinder volumes, network topology, security groups, and metadata — as a single, consistent unit.
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Multi-tenant, self-service recovery, so tenants and project users can back up and restore their own workloads under your RBAC policy, without always needing to go through a cloud administrator.
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Native integration, installed and managed alongside your OpenStack services using your distribution’s own deployment process, with no intrusive agents inside your VMs.
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Flexible storage options, letting you back up on-premises or to the cloud, and store data as close to — or as far from — your cloud as you need.
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Full and incremental backups, so subsequent backups only move the data that has changed.
Q: Why should I use Trilio for my OpenStack backups?
A: A handful of reasons customers consistently give me:
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Native and agentless: Trilio installs and runs alongside your other OpenStack services, with nothing to install inside guest VMs.
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Scalable: Trilio is built to handle large, multi-tenant OpenStack deployments without performance degradation, even at telco scale.
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No vendor lock-in: Trilio uses industry-standard, non-proprietary backup formats, so your backups remain accessible even if you ever switch tools.
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Self-service for tenants: Business users can be enabled to back up and restore their own projects, reducing the operational burden on IT.
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Distribution-aware: Trilio keeps pace with the latest OpenStack releases across supported distributions, including Red Hat OpenStack Platform, Canonical OpenStack, Kolla-Ansible, Mirantis, and OpenStack-Helm, BigStack and others.
Learn KubeVirt & OpenShift Virtualization Backup & Recovery Best Practices
More Advanced Questions
Q: What exactly does Trilio back up in an OpenStack workload?
A: Trilio performs application-centric backups, meaning it captures everything required to recover an entire workload – not just a single disk. Specifically, Trilio collects:
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Complete disk volumes (boot and Cinder) at the block storage level
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Complete network topology, including routers, subnets, subnet DHCP ranges and routes, networks, ports, and MAC addresses
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Storage volumes from Cinder, or directly from Ceph for more efficient backups
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Cinder volume configuration, volume types, and metadata
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Security groups and keys
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VMs, whether single or multiple
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VM metadata (e.g. availability zones, hints) and flavors (VM sizing)
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Boot images and overlays
Q: Can you do full and incremental backups?
A: Yes. Trilio supports both full and incremental backups, so after the initial full backup, subsequent jobs only capture what has changed — which keeps backup windows short even as your environment grows.
Q: What backup format do you use for backups?
A: Trilio uses industry-standard, non-proprietary formats rather than a locked-in, vendor-specific backup format. This is a deliberate design choice: it helps customers avoid vendor lock-in, keeps recovery future-proof, and ensures your backups remain accessible and portable even if you later change tools or platforms. I’ve seen too many organizations get boxed in by a proprietary format — it’s not a position I’d wish on anyone.
Q: Do you run any agents inside my VMs or on my OpenStack nodes?
A: No. Trilio is agentless. It’s installed and managed natively alongside your other OpenStack services, using your distribution’s own deployment process, rather than requiring agents inside guest VMs. However, Trilio recognises the Qemu Guest Agent if it is running to provide additional steps like disk quiesce and application quiescing.
Q: Which OpenStack distributions does Trilio support?
A: Trilio is natively installed and managed alongside OpenStack services across a range of distributions, including Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat OpenStack Services on OpenShift (RHOSO), Canonical OpenStack (Charms and Sunbeam), Kolla-Ansible, Mirantis OpenStack for Kubernetes (MOSK), and OpenStack-Helm. I’d recommend checking Trilio’s support matrix documentation for the most current list of supported versions, since this evolves alongside each distribution’s release cadence.
Q: Are my backups stored inside my OpenStack cloud?
A: Trilio is storage-agnostic and lets you write your backups to storage local to the OpenStack cloud on-premises or to the storage on a public cloud or different datacenter, so you can keep backups as close to your cloud as you need for fast recovery, or as far away as you need for disaster recovery – even in a different region entirely.
Q: Can I restore my workload to a different availability zone or a different cloud entirely?
A: Yes. Trilio supports a range of recovery scenarios beyond a simple in-place restore, including recovery to a new availability zone, a new cloud, disaster recovery scenarios, and test/dev environments.
Q: Who is allowed to restore workloads?
A: That’s determined by your own Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) policy. Common roles typically granted restore permissions include cloud administrators, backup administrators, and tenant or project users – depending on how self-service you want your recovery process to be. Trilio is designed as Backup-as-a-Service. It is designed for the tenant users to be able to restore workloads to their tenants.
Q: Can Trilio back up Cinder volumes directly from Ceph?
A: Yes. In addition to backing up through Cinder, Trilio can capture storage volumes directly from Ceph, which can make the backup process considerably more efficient for Ceph-backed OpenStack clouds.
Q: Does Trilio capture network configuration, or just the disks?
A: Trilio captures the complete network topology associated with a workload — including routers, subnets, networks, ports, security groups, rules and MAC addresses – alongside the VM’s disks and metadata. This is what allows a workload to be recovered as a functioning application, rather than just a set of disconnected volumes sitting on storage somewhere.
Q: What restore options do I have beyond a simple one-click restore?
A: Trilio supports multiple recovery options depending on the scenario:
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One-Click Restore the undo button. It restores your VMs back to the original locations, original names, original names and metadata.
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In-Place Restore restore individual Cinder or Boot volumes
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Selective-Restore restore with changes. Restore to a different flavor, different network, different IP address, clone, different Availability Zone.
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Operational recovery (on the fly), for quick recovery from day-to-day issues
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Disaster recovery, for recovering entire workloads or projects after a major failure
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Test/Dev, for spinning up a point-in-time copy of production for testing
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New clouds, for recovering into an entirely different OpenStack cloud
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File/folder-level restore, for granular recovery without restoring an entire volume
Q: Can I resize a VM or change its flavor as part of the restore process?
A: Yes. Trilio supports resizing VMs during restore, along with other metadata changes such as Cinder volume type and network changes – so a restored workload doesn’t have to come back in exactly the same shape it was backed up in. This comes in handy more often than you’d think, particularly during migrations or capacity replanning.
Q: How does Trilio support multi-tenancy and self-service recovery?
A: Trilio is built as a native, multi-tenant solution for OpenStack. Backup and restore permissions are governed by your RBAC policy, so you can choose how much autonomy to give tenants and project users – from a fully centralized model run by cloud and backup administrators, to a self-service model where tenants back up and restore their own projects independently.
Q: Where can I store my OpenStack backups?
A: Trilio is storage-agnostic and only requires S3 or NFS, so backups can be stored on-premises or in the cloud, depending on your requirements for cost, performance, and disaster recovery. That flexibility matters – it means you’re never locked into a single storage vendor or a single physical location.
Q: Does Trilio support migrating workloads between OpenStack clouds, not just backup and recovery?
A: Yes. Because Trilio captures a complete, point-in-time copy of a workload – VMs, volumes, network topology, and metadata – workloads captured by Trilio can easily be migrated to a different OpenStack cloud. This allows you to migrate to new distributions of OpenStack, perform DR or help with upgrades by providing a route for a parallel upgrade from one version of OpenStack to another.
Q: Can Trilio protect Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) workloads?
A: Yes. NFV workloads can be backed up and restored just like any other OpenStack workload. Trilio can restore an entire virtual network function (VNF), selected VNFs, or individual data items from a point-in-time copy, and can also restore the OpenStack network topology as part of disaster recovery for NFV environments. For telcos, where quality of service depends directly on rapid recovery, this capability isn’t optional – it’s foundational.
Q: How does Trilio fit into a broader disaster recovery strategy for OpenStack?
A: Trilio has Trilio Site Recovery for OpenStack which provides VMware SRM-like functionality. It is built to make OpenStack disaster recovery genuinely straightforward, letting you restore entire workloads or projects back to your cloud’s last known-good state – whether that’s on the same cloud, a different availability zone, or an entirely different cloud. This is particularly relevant for organizations in telecom, defense, automotive, and financial services, where I’ve seen Trilio used to recover from disasters, migrate workloads, and move to new infrastructure or software distributions with minimal disruption.
Conclusion
As you’ve seen throughout this FAQ, OpenStack backups are essential for safeguarding your virtual machines, volumes, network configurations, and the metadata that ties it all together. By implementing a robust, application-centric backup strategy and using a reliable, native solution like Trilio, you can minimize downtime, prevent data loss, and keep your OpenStack cloud resilient — whether you’re running a small private cloud or a large, multi-tenant telco-grade deployment.
If you have a question that isn’t answered here, or you’d like to hear more from us, please reach out. We’ll keep updating this FAQ as new questions – and new capabilities – come up.
Key Takeaways:
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OpenStack backups protect the full workload: VMs, Cinder volumes, network topology, security groups, and metadata: not just individual disks.
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The most important aspect of any backup are the restores. Ensure you choose a solution that correctly aligns to OpenStack to avoid disappointment and downtime.
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Different backup approaches (snapshot, full, incremental) suit different recovery needs.
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Choosing the right strategy depends on your RTOs, RPOs, and multi-tenant requirements.
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Trilio is a native, agentless, multi-tenant backup and recovery solution purpose-built for OpenStack. It does not try to be a generic KVM hypervisor solution like some other “OpenStack compatible” solutions.
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Trilio supports flexible recovery scenarios, including disaster recovery, migration, new availability zones, and file-level restore.
Embrace Data Protection for a Resilient OpenStack Cloud
By prioritizing data protection, you empower your OpenStack environment to withstand disruptions and maintain business continuity. With Trilio as your trusted backup partner, you can confidently operate your OpenStack cloud, knowing your workloads, networks, and data remain resilient and recoverable – no matter what comes your way.
We hope this blog post has given you a comprehensive look at OpenStack backups and the role Trilio plays in protecting your cloud. If you have further questions or need help implementing a backup strategy, feel free to contact our experts.
