Feature Update October 2025

Since our last major CloudCasa feature update, spring has turned to summer and summer, just recently, has turned to fall. But as we approach the end of the summer growing season here, we think the bumper crop of new features in this update will more than justify the wait. We’ve continued to make improvements aimed at VM-on-Kubernetes users, added cool new core features, and built in a whole new class of capabilities related to fast disaster recovery.

CloudCasa DR for Storage

A new feature called CloudCasa DR for Storage premieres in this release. This allows CloudCasa to support low-RTO disaster recovery (DR) by integrating with remote volume replication capabilities provided by the storage layer. With this option selected, restores to a DR cluster will automatically take advantage of replicated volumes, restoring Kubernetes resources from backup storage but restoring PVs using their replicas. This can result in recovery times that are orders of magnitude faster than when using traditional restores.

In this first release, support has been provided for SUSE Storage (Longhorn), and in particular Longhorn DR Volumes. Support for additional storage replication solutions and more DR-related features will be coming in future releases!

A new Clusters/Disaster Recovery page has been added in the UI to help manage these features. It shows a cluster view similar to the Clusters/Overview page, but provides different actions and only displays clusters that have the CloudCasa DR for Storage option enabled on them. This option must be enabled for all clusters that will be DR for Storage source or destination clusters. In the future, more DR-related features will be available here.

CloudCasa DR for storage is only available to users with paid subscriptions, and there are additional per-worker-node charges to use it.

Backup to NFS

In the past, CloudCasa only supported object storage as a backup target. Object storage is ideal for storing backups, but it isn’t always readily available in all environments. Now, we’ve added support for backing up to NFS shares as well. We expect that this will be especially useful in edge and small office environments, where NAS is more likely to be available than object storage.

A new NFS Storage tab has been added to the Configuration/Storage page to allow users to configure NFS storage. Once added, NFS storage can be selected and used like any other user-defined storage. The only limitation is that NFS storage does NOT support immutability.

As part of this change, the Backup to object storage backup option has been renamed to Copy to backup storage.

File-level restore for VMs

CloudCasa has supported file-level restores since our March 2025 update, but with this release an entirely new facility has been added that allows users to restore individual files from filesystems within KubeVirt VMs. And it does this without requiring any sort of per-VM agent!

Since VMs typically use block type PVs that are opaque to the Kubernetes cluster itself, the normal CloudCasa file-level restore facility will not work with them. But fear not! File-level restore for VMs is now available! You can retrieve individual files from a VM’s filesystems by using the Recovery Point File Browser. Go to Clusters/Recovery Points and choose the Files action for the desired recovery point. This will open the file browser. Choose the VM you are interested in, and click the Browse icon next to it to open the VM file browser. The VM file browser will actually mount an image of the VM filesystem, so you will need to choose a proxy cluster and select the PVC(s) you are interested in browsing. The Proxy Cluster can be any cluster that supports running VMs and has access to the backup storage containing the recovery point. It defaults to the source cluster.

Note that you may need to wait a bit for file data to be retrieved. You can then browse the VM’s filesystems and select files to be retrieved. These files can be downloaded directly to your workstation or to another system as a zip file. Click Download and choose “Download Now” or “Create Download Link”. Download links will expire in 1 hour, by default, but there is an option to adjust this.

Note that as part of this update, the Browse action button for entries listed on the Clusters/Recovery Points page was re-labeled to Resources, since now both resource browsing and file browsing options are available. Use the Resources button to open the recovery point resource browser.

File download

The same recovery point browsing and file download process described above can also be used to allow direct downloading of files from a backup of any non-VM filesystem type PV. This can be useful in cases where you want to retrieve a backed-up file for inspection or some other use, but where having to first perform a conventional restore operation to a PV in a cluster would be difficult.

Resource modifiers

A new feature that allows for the modification of generic Kubernetes resources by restore, migration, or replication jobs is now available to all users with premium (paid) subscription plans. This is implemented via a new Enable Resource Modifiers option in the “Restore Transforms” step of the Cluster Restore, Migration, and Replication wizards. When this option is enabled, the user can upload a YAML file describing the resource modifications that should be made. The resource modifier file format is compatible with the Restore Resource Modifier format used by Velero.

Free Plan worker node limit reduced to 5

As previously announced in July, we have reduced the maximum monthly average number of worker nodes that are permitted under the CloudCasa Free Service Plan from 10 to 5. We are offering limited-time discounts on upgrades to CloudCasa Pro plans for existing Free Plan users affected by this change. Contact CloudCasa sales for details.

Other changes

An organization-level option has been added to disable CloudCasa for Velero features, thus simplifying the UI somewhat for users who don’t need those features. This was previously available only in the self-hosted version.
CloudCasa will now list all cloud resources created during the running of restore or replication jobs that creates new cloud clusters. These are displayed in a new Cloud Resources tab in the Activity Details view. (Previously released)
Descriptive names for Rancher Project resources are now displayed in the resource browser. (Previously released)
The “PV Details (Restore)” tab now shows status information for restores from snapshots. (Previously released)
Automatic agent updates can now be enabled even if a private container registry has been configured. However, this is not recommended unless new agent images will always be made immediately available in the private registry (i.e. the configured private container registry is a caching proxy).
A “last active” date is now shown for clusters in the Pending state that were previously Active. This information is visible in the warning message on the cluster dashboard, or by mousing over the State label for entries in the Clusters/Overview page.
After adding a cluster and displaying agent installation commands, the UI will now show a Done button rather than Save. There is no need to actually “Save” at this point in the process because the cluster has already been created and the user hasn’t made any updates to its configuration.
The CloudCasa agent now automatically detects when KubeVirt is installed on a cluster and reconfigures itself to support it. Previously it required a reinstall or restart after KubeVirt installation.
The overall number of containers used by the CloudCasa agent has been reduced.

New certifications

We are pleased to announce that, working with SUSE, we have certified CloudCasa as being fully compatible with SUSE Virtualization and SUSE AI!

Kubernetes agent updates

In this update we’ve again made several changes to our Kubernetes agent to add features, improve performance, and fix bugs. Some new product features will not work with older versions of the agent. However, manual updates shouldn’t normally be necessary anymore because of the automatic agent update feature. If you have automatic updates disabled for any of your agents, you should update them manually as soon as possible.

Notes

With some browsers you may need to restart, hit Control-F5, and/or clear the cache to make sure you have the latest version of the CloudCasa web app when first logging in after the update. You can also try selectively removing cookies and site data for cloudcasa.io if you encounter any odd behavior.

As always, we want to hear your feedback on new features! You can contact us using the support chat feature, or by sending email to support@cloudcasa.io.