I’ve recently been doing some work with Rubrik Envoy in the lab and thought I’d run through the basics. There’s a new document outlining the process on the articles page.
Why Envoy?
This page explains it better than I do, but Envoy is ostensibly a way for service providers to deliver Rubrik services to customers sitting on networks that are isolated from the Rubrik environment. Why would you need to do this? There are all kinds of reasons why you don’t want to give your tenants direct access to your data protection resources, and most of these revolve around security (even if your Rubrik environment is secured appropriately). As many SPs will also tell you, bringing private networks from a tenant / edge into your core is usually not a great experience either.
At a high level, it looks like this.
In this example, Tenant A sits on a private network, and the Envoy Tenant Network is 10.0.1.10. The Rubrik Routable Network on the Envoy appliance is 192.168.0.201, and the data management interface on the Rubrik cluster is 192.168.0.200. The Envoy appliance talks to tenant hosts over ports 12800 and 12801. The Rubrik cluster communicates with Envoy over ports 7500 and 7501. The only time the tenant network communicates with the Rubrik cluster is when the Envoy / Rubrik UI is used by the tenant. This is accessed over a port specified when the Organization is created (see below), and the Envoy to cluster communication is over port 443.
Other Notes
Envoy isn’t a data mover in its current iteration, but rather a way for SPs to present some self-service capabilities to tenants in a controlled fashion without relying on third-party portals or network translation tools. So if you had a bunch of workloads sitting in a tenant’s environment, you’d be better served deploying Rubrik Air / Edge appliances and then replicating that data into the core. If your tenant has a vCenter environment with a few VMs, you can use the Rubrik Backup Service to backup those VMs, but you couldn’t setup vCenter as a source for the tenant unless you opened up networks between your environments by some other means and added it to your Rubrik cluster. This would be ugly at best.
Note also that the deployment assumes you’re creating an Organization in the Rubrik appliance that will be used to isolate the tenant’s data and access from other tenants in the environment. To get hold of the Envoy OVA appliance and credentials, you need to run through the Organization creation process and connect the Envoy appliance when prompted. You’ll also need to ensure that you’ve configured Roles correctly for your tenant’s environment.
If, for some reason, you need to change or view the IP configuration of the Envoy appliance, it’s important to note that the articles on the Rubrik support site are a little out of step with CentOS 7 (i.e. written for Ubuntu). I don’t know whether this is because I’m using Rubrik Air appliances in the lab, but I think it’s maybe just a shift. In any case, to get IP information, you need to login to the console and go to /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts. You’ll find a couple of files (ifcfg-eth0 and ifcfg-eth1) that will tell you whether you’ve made a boo boo with your configuration or not.
Conclusion
I’m the first to admit it took a little while to understand the utility of something like Envoy. Most SPs struggle to deliver self-service capabilities for services that don’t always do network multi-tenancy very well. This is a good step in the direction of solving some of the problems associated with that. It’s also important to understand that, if your tenant has workloads sitting in VMware Cloud Director, for example, they’ll be accessing Rubrik resources in a different fashion. As I mentioned before, if there is a bit to protect on the edge site, it’s likely a better option to deploy a virtualised Rubrik appliance or a smaller cluster and replicate that data. In any case, I’ll update this post if I come across anything else useful.