What tool can be used to back up and restore workloads on clusters provisioned by vSphere Supervisor?

Velero is an open-source tool designed to safely back up and restore, perform disaster recovery, and migrate Kubernetes cluster resources and persistent volumes. VMware provides specific guidance and a validated plugin for using Velero with vSphere with Tanzu. This allows administrators to protect stateful workloads running on Supervisor Clusters by backing up both the Kubernetes object metadata and the persistent volume data stored on vSphere storage.

B. VMware Live Recovery: This is a portfolio of disaster recovery services, not a specific tool for backing up Kubernetes workloads within a Supervisor cluster.

C. Restic: Restic is a backup tool that Velero can optionally use as a backend for file-system level volume backups, but Velero is the primary orchestrator for the entire workload.

D. Site Recovery Manager: This is a VM-level disaster recovery solution for vSphere environments and does not operate at the Kubernetes object level to protect workloads on a Supervisor.

1. VMware vSphere with Tanzu Documentation, "Back Up and Restore vSphere with Tanzu Workloads," Section: "Back Up and Restore Supervisor and TKG cluster workloads using Velero". This section explicitly states, "You can use Velero to back up and restore workloads on clusters provisioned by vSphere with Tanzu."

2. VMware vSphere with Tanzu Documentation, "Install and Configure Velero on Supervisor," This guide provides the step-by-step procedure for deploying the Velero server and the vSphere Velero Plugin.