When a VM hosting your Tanzu Kubernetes cluster crashes, your recovery strategy can make or break application availability. Traditional VM backups often miss Kubernetes-specific data, leading to incomplete or inconsistent restores. This guide walks you through a reliable recovery process using CloudCasa, ensuring you restore both infrastructure and application state with confidence. 

Why VM Backups Alone Fall Short for Tanzu 

VM-level backups are designed for infrastructure, not for the complexities of Kubernetes. Tanzu clusters—running on VMware—comprise dynamic resources like pods, persistent volumes, secrets, and custom objects. Restoring a VM snapshot might bring the host back online, but it won’t necessarily restore your cluster’s control plane, workloads, or configurations correctly. 

Common pitfalls with VM-only restores: 

• Lost etcd state or corrupted control plane components 
• Out-of-sync persistent volume claims 
• Missing application manifests or configmaps 
• No visibility into namespace-level or Helm-deployed resources 

To fully recover from a Tanzu VM failure, you need a Kubernetes-native backup and restore solution. 

Tanzu VM Failure Recovery with CloudCasa 

CloudCasa supports agentless, Kubernetes-aware backups for Tanzu clusters running on VMware. Here’s how to perform a full recovery: 

Step 1: Assess the Failure Scope 

Before triggering any recovery, identify: 

• Which VM(s) failed—worker node, control plane, or both? 
• Are persistent volumes or shared storage affected? 
• Was the CloudCasa agent or CSI driver impacted? 

If the control plane is lost, you may need to rebootstrap a new Tanzu cluster first. 

Step 2: Rebuild Infrastructure if Necessary 

If the VM host cannot be recovered: 

• Provision a new VM via vSphere with the same specs 
• Rejoin the node to the cluster if only a worker was lost 
• If the entire cluster is lost, use the same Tanzu YAML templates or Terraform scripts to recreate the cluster infrastructure 

 Step 3: Reinstall CloudCasa Agent 

If the control plane is accessible but the CloudCasa agent is missing: 

kubectl apply -f https://app.cloudcasa.io/k8s/install.sh 

Ensure the agent connects to your CloudCasa dashboard and is linked to the correct cluster identity. 

Step 4: Restore Cluster Resources 

In CloudCasa: 

1. Navigate to your Tanzu cluster backup snapshot 
2. Choose “Restore” → “Cluster restore” or “Namespace-level restore” 
3. Confirm whether to overwrite existing resources or restore to a new namespace 
4. Restore PVCs, Helm releases, and RBAC settings if included in the backup

Step 5: Validate Application Health 

After restore: 

• Check kubectl get pods -A for running workloads 
• Validate service endpoints and ingress 
• Confirm that PVCs are mounted and data is intact 
• Restart any failed pods or services as needed 

Best Practices for Tanzu Cluster Protection 

To avoid data loss in future failures: 

✅ Schedule daily or hourly backups in CloudCasa
✅ Include etcd, PVCs, and all namespaces
✅ Test restores monthly to validate cluster integrity
✅ Tag critical workloads for high-priority backup
✅ Integrate with vSphere alerts for automated triggers 

Conclusion 

Tanzu Kubernetes clusters are powerful but can be fragile when relying solely on VM-level protection. With CloudCasa’s Kubernetes-native backup, you get peace of mind knowing your clusters are application-consistent and fully restorable—even after severe VM-level failures. 

Strengthen your recovery strategy today and keep your Tanzu environment