Backing up Iscsi volume

[renderman]

Greetings,

I have two FN boxes setup that are just large Iscsi datastores for ESXi hosts. I'm wanting to have one as a primary and one as a backup.

In an ideal world, I want them to stay regularly in sync (hourly or so) so if the primary goes, we can just boot up VM's from the second.

I've configured ZFS replication for snapshots but how does one clone the 'initial' zfs volume that the snapshots are changes of? It's all left me slightly confused about the best way to replicate an Iscsi zfs volume to another box.

Thoughts?

Render

 

[cyberjock]

When you setup ZFS replication and snapshots if the destination doesn't have the "base" data then the snapshot will include it. There is no way to accidentally (or on purpose) "leave out" data since a snapshot points to all data on the given zpool/dataset at that time.

In short, don't worry about it. It'll do the thinking for you. :)

 

[renderman]

I'm seeing that the snapshots are coming accross and have the correct file size for the 'base' contents. I guess the larger question is how to set up the reciving machines extents. Do I create a volume or does it get auto populated?

So far, with the 'send' machine having a device extent, if I do not create a similar extent on the 'recieve' machine, a file extent (dataset) is created but is not mountable via iscsi. If I do create a device extent on the 'recieve', I end up with two volumes, one I created, one from the replication. I'm just wanting to replicate changes from one ZFS volume ISCSI extent to another on a remote machine.

ZFS is new to me, so I'm sure I'm missing something simple. Any insigight is helpful