Replicating between 2 freenas boxes over vpn?

[zenn68]

Not asking for specifics of how to configure, but more in general about usability and performance. I have about 1.5Tb of data (Virtual machines backed up daily to a FreeNAS iscsi share on local LAN) I have another office across a solid VPN link. I think I want to put another FreeNAS box there and have box1 replicate to box 2 daily as external backups. Is replication a good solution or is there a better way to go about this? What about doing an intial full "sync" on local LAN then bringing Box2 to the other office (across town) and running incremental for the next 6-12 months? Any thoughts or experience with this?

 

[jgreco]

Yup. Should work fine. The initial replication will kill most WAN connections, VPN or otherwise, but as long as there isn't a huge daily delta it will be fine. Your idea of doing the initial full on the local LAN is the obvious solution.

You will also want to keep it on the local LAN for a few days to get a feel for what your bandwidth requirements are. This means you actually need to go look at the bandwidth consumed for the daily deltas. If your daily deltas are averaging ~12 hours of bandwidth then you may run into issues when you someday do some VM updates or something like that. If your daily deltas are small and quick then you're probably in a good place.

 

[zenn68]

say I got this up and running reliably across the WAN link. How would I go about monitoring

 

[jgreco]

Monitoring what, exactly? Bandwidth usage? You'd have to look. Replication status? You'd have to set up e-mail notifications, or look.