Best practice; vmware snapshots - two FN boxes with FN LUNs

[LearnLearnLearn]

Before you say search the forums or the net, yes, I've done that, a lot. My question isn't much about asking how to do it but more about which way might be better.

So, I have two FN 9.3 boxes set up, on the same local LAN segment.
Both have fibre channel cards installed and each is connected to an IBM BladeCEnter so the blades can access either FN box LUNs I've created and shared. The LUNs are zvol.

What I'd like to do is to have daily snapshots of the vms running off the storage on FN #1.

I see the VMware-Snapshot function but was also wondering about using a sync method from FN#1 to FN#2.

The key to my question being that while I'd like to backup, I would prefer not having to copy every single byte of data over to FN#2 repeatedly to have recent backups. That would take up a lot of never ending network bandwidth so I'm trying to find the most efficient way of doing this.

 

[Ben Bliss]

This should work out assuming you keep enough snapshot history and have some other type of backup available. I personally use the 3 copies rule. We have the primary SAN do snapshots every 30mins and we keep 2 days and then we have dailys, weeklys, monthlys etc. Then we have a replication to another onsite SAN every 15mins. We also replicate offsite to a system we have in a datacenter. We also take tapes offisite but we have some govt regs to comply with.

 

[LearnLearnLearn]

In the case of this setup, it's mostly development stuff so non critical but needs to be reliable to at least one day of backups. In fact, if not too resource intensive, every 12hrs would be even better.

At one point, I was doing a snapshot from esxi to second storage device but I can't recall at this point if that could be automated or not. I think not with esxi.
I noticed the VMware-snapshot function on FN which is why I became interested in this kind of setup.

Basically, if the vms got trashed, I just want a nice simple way of restoring, even if we're down for a little while as I fire up the backups from another blade for example. Just not sure what the options are or which way might be best.

Like I say, my main goal being not to have to completely backup and copy every bytes repeatedly.

>This should work out assuming you keep enough snapshot history and have some other
>type of backup available

How do you go about it, do you use FN's features, VMware's or the SAN devices themselves which often have snapshots. I've used BlueArc and OnStor stuff which has built in snapshot functions but in this case, FN is the storage.

 

[Ben Bliss]

I would use the replication function. Have it replicate every few hours keep 2 days.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[LearnLearnLearn]

I assume you mean the Freenas replicate function?
I'm hoping to take advantage of the 4GB fiber channel connection between both FN servers instead of using Ethernet. I think replication will only allow ssh.

 

[Ben Bliss]

I am meaning the replication function built into freenas. It is snapshot based and uses zfs send/receive. Once the initial seed replication is complete it only syncs the changes from the last snapshot. I can replicate a 4tb used zvol over lan 1gbe very quickly. I have a snapshot replication going every 15mins. When I replicate down to my datacenter rack I do every 30mins and this is over a 100mb VPN link. If you are really concerned just get to 2 chelsio 420t's and direct connect the 2 systems using passive SFP+ cables for 10gbe links. If the zfs send/receive over SSH is to slow for the 10gbe and your comfortable with some scripting you could do it with netcat. http://blog.smartcore.net.au/fast-zfs-send-with-netcat/

 

[LearnLearnLearn]

I *think* I've come across something I didn't expect.
As we've talked about, I set up a zvol on nas01 and I want to replicate it on nas02.
The zvol is being used with the FC network over iSCSI as I understand freenas.

When trying to replicate, I get a notice;

The system was unable to replicate snapshot pool01/esxNas01 to 192.168.1.24
======================
cannot open 'pool01/esxNas01': operation not applicable to datasets of this type
cannot receive new filesystem stream: unable to restore to destination

I'm guessing I cannot replicate this type.

 

[LearnLearnLearn]

I want to back everything up on nas02 on a regular basis but I've not found enough information to actually get replication to work so, will update this when I have.