Daily Replication w/ Automated Backup Server Wake Up & Encrypted Replication Target [Possible???]

[svtkobra7]

Bouncing a thought off the wall ...

I have two ESXi hosts and lets say one is primary and the other secondary, with the later being primarily used to have an on-site backup of the primary (not precisely the case, but for the sake of this thread) ...

Is it possible to to do something like this on a daily basis?

11:45 PM => Use vSphere/IPMI/WOL etc to wake up ESXi-02
~11:48 PM => FreeNAS-02 VM auto starts
12:00 AM => Execute all replication tasks in FreeNAS
~12:30 AM => Upon completion of all replication, sleep ESXi-02

My assumption is that something like that is possible for daily replication (without too much effort - I just don't know how to configure at the moment), but taking it a step further ... let me layer in one bit of complexity.

• Pools on FreeNAS-01 and FreeNAS-02 are both encrypted.
• So can I store the geli.key / passphrase for FreeNAS-02 on FreeNAS-01, so a script executed on FreeNAS-01 unlocks FreeNAS-02 (requisite for replication tasks)?
• I've never attempted to play around with scripted geli unlock (and why would you as you would need to store the key somewhere that is un-encrypted, thus defeating one of the reasons for encrypting) ...
  
• ... but if the geli.key / passphrase is stored on a pool that is already unlocked and encrypted itself, I don't see that concern being relevant.

Possible? Guidance?

 

[dlavigne]

Did you decide upon a solution for this?

 

[svtkobra7]

Did you decide upon a solution for this?

Thanks for the follow up on this one as well ... I've done some additional research and know how to tie out many of the bits individually, but need some spare time to tie everything together (which may be a moment). Hopefully someone has had a need for such a solution before and comes forward to assist, but in absence of such, I'll take a shot at it myself.