Elliot Dierksen
Guru
- Joined
- Dec 29, 2014
- Messages
- 1,135
I have two FreeNAS units that are both running 11.2-U6 on bare metal Cisco UCS C240 M3S servers, and a really old Netgear ReadyNAS unit. I finally got around to setting up reasonably proper rsynch modules and jobs, and that all appears to have copied the files correctly. My question is around the backing up of my 3 VM's that are running all the time on on ESXi 6.5 servers using the FreeNAS units for storage over NFS. Those are a FreeBSD VM (my mail server), a Vcenter appliance, and an APC Powerchute appliance (UPS monitoring). I have had bad luck with how recoverable these VM's are if they lose connectivity with the storage. I am trying to figure out a way to get a cold backup, or a usable hot/warm backup. Since I kick off the backups manually (the secondary FN is the backup target and I don't keep it running all the time), I have thought about shutting down the VM's and taking a snapshot of the ZFS data set. Then I can bring the VM's back up and copy over the cold version from the snapshot. I am sure that would work, but I was wondering if there was a better way of attacking this.