Simplifying Data Management and Protection Introduction:

Data management and protection are critical aspects of modern IT operations. Organizations need efficient and reliable solutions to manage and protect their data across on-premises and cloud environments. Rubrik, a leading provider of cloud data management solutions, offers a comprehensive platform that simplifies data management tasks. Rubrik PowerShell, part of the Rubrik API, provides a powerful and flexible way to interact with Rubrik’s platform programmatically. In this article, we will explore the capabilities of Rubrik PowerShell and how it simplifies data management and protection in today’s dynamic IT environments.

1. Understanding Rubrik: Before diving into Rubrik PowerShell, it is essential to have a basic understanding of Rubrik and its cloud data management platform. Rubrik is designed to simplify backup, recovery, and data management tasks across hybrid cloud environments. It provides a unified platform that allows organizations to manage and protect their data across different infrastructure types, including virtualized environments, physical servers, and public clouds.

2. Introduction to Rubrik PowerShell: Rubrik PowerShell is a module that allows administrators to interact with the Rubrik API using PowerShell scripting. It provides a comprehensive set of cmdlets that enable automation and orchestration of various data management tasks, such as backup and recovery, replication, archival, and more. Rubrik PowerShell leverages the Rubrik RESTful API, providing a seamless integration with the Rubrik platform.

3. Installing and Configuring Rubrik PowerShell: To start using Rubrik PowerShell, you need to install the module and configure the connection to your Rubrik cluster. Follow these steps to install and configure Rubrik PowerShell: a. Install the Rubrik PowerShell module: – Open a PowerShell session with administrative privileges. – Run the following command to install the module from the PowerShell Gallery:

powershell
     Install-Module -Name Rubrik
     

b. Connect to the Rubrik cluster: – Run the following command to establish a connection to your Rubrik cluster:

powershell
     Connect-Rubrik -Server <Rubrik_Cluster_IP> -Username <Username> -Password <Password>
     

Replace “, “, and “ with the appropriate values for your Rubrik cluster.

4. Key Capabilities of Rubrik PowerShell: Rubrik PowerShell provides a wide range of capabilities for managing and protecting data. Some of the key features include:

a. Backup and Recovery: – Create and manage backup policies and schedules. – Perform on-demand backups of virtual machines, databases, and file systems. – Initiate recovery operations, including full VM restores, file-level restores, and database recoveries.

b. Replication and Disaster Recovery:

– Configure replication to replicate data to a secondary Rubrik cluster or public cloud.

– Perform failover and failback operations for disaster recovery scenarios.

– Test and validate replication and disaster recovery plans.

c. Archival and Long-term Retention:

– Define archival policies to move data to lower-cost storage tiers, such as object storage or tape.

– Manage long-term retention of data for compliance and regulatory requirements.

– Retrieve and restore archived data when needed.

d. Reporting and Monitoring:

– Generate reports on backup status, recovery points, and data protection compliance.

– Monitor the health and performance of Rubrik clusters and associated resources.

– Set up alerts and notifications for critical events and thresholds.

5. Example Use Cases: To illustrate the power and flexibility of Rubrik PowerShell, let’s explore some example use cases:

a. Automating Backup and Recovery:

– Use PowerShell scripts to automate the creation of backup policies and schedules.

– Schedule regular backups and perform on-demand backups of critical systems.

– Automate the recovery process, allowing for quick and efficient restores of individual files or entire VMs.

b. Orchestrating Disaster Recovery:

– Automate the replication of data to a secondary Rubrik cluster or public cloud.

– Develop PowerShell workflows to orchestrate failover and failback operations during disaster recovery scenarios.

– Test and validate disaster recovery plans using PowerShell scripts.

c. Managing Archival and Long-term Retention:

– Use PowerShell to define archival policies and manage the movement of data to lower-cost storage tiers.

– Automate the retrieval and restoration of archived data when needed for compliance or legal purposes.

– Schedule PowerShell scripts to manage long-term retention and ensure data compliance.

6. Best Practices for Rubrik PowerShell:

To make the most of Rubrik PowerShell, consider the following best practices:

a. Understand the Rubrik RESTful API: – Familiarize yourself with the Rubrik RESTful API documentation to understand the available endpoints and resources. – Leverage the Rubrik PowerShell cmdlets as wrappers around the API to simplify scripting and automation.

b. Plan and Test your Scripts:

– Plan your PowerShell scripts carefully, considering the specific data management and protection tasks you want to automate.

– Test your scripts in a non-production environment before deploying them in a production environment.

– Regularly review and update your scripts to accommodate changes in your data management workflows.

c. Leverage PowerShell’s Ecosystem:

– Take advantage of PowerShell’s extensive ecosystem, including modules and community resources, to enhance your Rubrik PowerShell scripts.

– Explore the PowerShell Gallery and community forums for existing scripts and solutions that can be adapted to your specific requirements.

Conclusion: Rubrik PowerShell provides a powerful and flexible way to interact with the Rubrik platform, simplifying data management and protection tasks across hybrid cloud environments. With Rubrik PowerShell, administrators can automate backup and recovery, orchestrate disaster recovery operations, manage archival and long-term retention, and monitor the health and performance of their Rubrik clusters. By leveraging PowerShell’s scripting capabilities, organizations can streamline their data management workflows and ensure the availability and integrity of their critical data.

Rubrik is the world’s first Cloud Data Management platform that delivers data protection, search, analytics, and copy data management to hybrid cloud enterprises.

Why Rubrik ???

1: Rubrik will allow us to provide an effective backup solution for cloud clients.You find the idea of being able to dynamically set SLA’s to your VM’s across both private and public clouds.

2: Can spend less time focusing on building backup infrastructure and more time designing and maintaining solutions

3: The ease of deployment and amazing user interface for customers is a key differentiator in the market.

4: Zero time restores, granular recovery to the file level, and Google-like predictive search!!!! Whaooooo.

     The best part of Rubrik is that you reduce your RPO. The recovery of a Microsoft Exchange database took only minutes with Rubrik. Before it would have taken 12 hours to restore and then we would have had to mount the database with power tools that we purchased ourselves. The Google-like Rubrik file restores have been a life saver many times

5: Native Immutability to Fight Ransomware: Recover from ransomware with no data loss with immutable backups built into the platform. Resume business within minutes of an attack. Instantly search and recover files to any point-in-time, on-premises or in the cloud. No ransom, no downtime.

How do Rubrik make backups interesting and simple?

Add vCenter :

1. Log in to the web UI.
2. Click the gear icon on the top right of the web UI.
The Settings menu appears.

3. From the Settings menu, select vCenter servers.
The Virtual Infrastructure page appears.

4. Click the blue + icon.
The Add vCenter dialog box appears.
5. In vCenter IP, type the resolvable hostname or IPv4 address of the vCenter Server.

6. In vCenter Username, type the username assigned to the Rubrik cluster.
7. In vCenter Password, type the password assigned to the Rubrik cluster.
8. Click Add.

So, once you add the vCenter you can check the VM list under Virtual Machine Tab :

Now we have to create SLA and add them to the VMs to initiate Backups.

Let us try to create an SLA now:

1. On the left pane of the Rubrik web UI, select SLA Domains > Local Domains.

2. Click the blue + icon.
The Create New SLA Domain dialog box appears

3. In SLA Domain Name, type a name for the new SLA Domain.Also, if you want to add the archival and replication setting click the “Configure Remote Settings “button on the same tab after you define the SLA.

4: You can see a new tab of “Remote Storage Configuration”

>> You can use your archival location and a retention policy as you wish to 🙂

>> Also the replication target:

>> Change the retention of archival or replication by adjusting the scroll bar :

4: We are ready to go now. Hit “Create SLA”

Now let us see how to add SLA to a VM :

1: Click on the VM and you can see a page like this :

You have options:

2: Click on “Manage Protection”

3: Click on  “Submit”

4: I took an on-demand snapshot.It is the first backup, so you might see a “warning ” at the bottom of the same page :

Few, moments and you see the progress :

And it completes in no time (First full back up might take some time depending on the size of VMDK )

So, it’s simple and very easy to perform backups now.

You are not a big fan of complexity than Rubrik is the best product to work with  🙂

There are few amazing features which recently came by with Rubrik 4.1 release . I tried pick some and post it here:

1 :Azure cloud instantiation :

Must say this was one of the most important feature which was requested by most of the customer and here it is now.You can use a VM snapshot to instantiate a VM on Azure. This might be useful for testing purposes.Guest OS supported are Windows server from 2008 to 2012 (If I am not wrong on this ) and Ubuntu 14.04+

2 :Archive to Google Cloud:

So in this ,you can use a Google Cloud solution Platform Buckets as Archival Locations.

3 :Virtual Machine inking:

This was also a very important feature was not part of previous releases.

Enable virtual machine linking to provide the ability to identify a virtual machine and all associated snapshots despite changes in the managed object reference ID (MOID) of the virtual machine.
The MOID of a virtual machine changes when the virtual machine is: re-registered, moved to another vCenter, or recovered using Rubrik Instant Recovery.
Virtual machine linking enables the following features to continue to be provided for a virtual machine, despite a MOID change:
>> Maintained snapshot history and availability
>> Continued incremental snapshots instead of requiring a full snapshot
>> Retained direct SLA Domain assignment Virtual machine linking is optional and can be enabled at the vCenter Server level.
Virtual machine linking is always enabled for Instant Recovery and always disabled for Live Mount.

There is a catch to it as well in user guide :

Note: The automatic linking feature does not perform any retroactive processing. For example, if the feature is turned off, and a VM is deleted and re-registered with the same vCenter, the re-registered VM will be added as a new VM. Even if automatic linking is turned on after that occurs, the new VM will not be linked to the previous VM.

4 :Hyper-V SCVMM support:

Haven’t seen in person if many customer are using Hyper-V but if you do , this is one of the feature you are looking for now.

Support for Microsoft Hyper-V System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM). This enables:
>> Full discovery of a Hyper-V environment.
>> Push install of the Rubrik Backup Service to Windows Servers that host Hyper-V and to Hyper-V Servers.

5 :Nutanix AHV:

There is  feature enhancement on AHV

>>Agent Based file restore

>>Application consistency backup by guest OD tools (Nutanix Guest OS)

>>Export is faster because of parallel thread execution.

6 :Improvement in custom reports:

>> System Capacity – Detailed information about the impact on system capacity of all protected objects.
>> Capacity Over Time – Capacity usage information over a specified period.
>> Global Protection Summary – Status and capacity information for all protected objects across all sites within the deployment.
>> Snapshot Summary (Missed and Successful) – Snapshot status and summary information for individual protected objects.

There are lot of other features which got pushed for 4.1 , these are the important ones.

Please feel free to comment on any Rubrik related queries to this channel.