Replication Between two FreeNAS Machines

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mattL

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Sep 1, 2017
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Hello! I have been messing around with FreeNAS for a few months now. It's a solid product and has been working fairly well for me. I have had a recent issue with the flash drives I was using to run the OS on. The problem involved me losing all access VIA the web and console locking up. With an error message about the Flash Drive being disconnected. This prompted me to reinstall NAS on different flash drives that are USB 2.0 and a different brand of flash drives. During the install, I wondered if my setup was perhaps not the best and I may have misunderstood some critical things about a proper setup. My setup is to have two FreeNAS machines replicate each other data stores. Each FreeNAS has x5 4TB hard drives, Intel Server Class NIC, and x2 8GB of ECC DDR4 RAM, each FreeNAS connects to the file server using iSCSI My configuration is as follows...

FreeNAS1 at office 1
FreenNAS1 has a 10TB extent and is mapped VIA iSCSI
Snapshot is performed twice a day with a retention period of six weeks
Snapshots are replicated to FreeNAS2 under the ZFS of Freenas2\Backup\Freenas1
Weekly scrubs are performed


FreeNAS 2 at office 2
FreenNAS1 has a 5TB extent and is mapped VIA iSCSI
Snapshot is performed twice a day with a retention period of six weeks
Snapshots are replicated to FreeNAS1 under the ZFS of Freenas1\Backup\Freenas2
Weekly scrubs are performed

My questions is since I am replicating extent and snapshots to FreeNAS devices will there a be a chance of overwriting the data contained on the Pull? I tried to account for overhead (about a 1TB-2TB of unused space on the entire volumes. But I noticed the extents are 10TB + 5TB so 15TB total being used, are the snapshots stored on the volumes and thus further decreasing the amount of storage? Please let me know if you need further clarification on my question, and thank you for taking the time to answer it. :)

--Matt
 

Evertb1

Guru
Joined
May 31, 2016
Messages
700
Hello! I have been messing around with FreeNAS for a few months now. It's a solid product and has been working fairly well for me. I have had a recent issue with the flash drives I was using to run the OS on. The problem involved me losing all access VIA the web and console locking up. With an error message about the Flash Drive being disconnected. This prompted me to reinstall NAS on different flash drives that are USB 2.0 and a different brand of flash drives. During the install, I wondered if my setup was perhaps not the best and I may have misunderstood some critical things about a proper setup. My setup is to have two FreeNAS machines replicate each other data stores. Each FreeNAS has x5 4TB hard drives, Intel Server Class NIC, and x2 8GB of ECC DDR4 RAM, each FreeNAS connects to the file server using iSCSI My configuration is as follows...

FreeNAS1 at office 1
FreenNAS1 has a 10TB extent and is mapped VIA iSCSI
Snapshot is performed twice a day with a retention period of six weeks
Snapshots are replicated to FreeNAS2 under the ZFS of Freenas2\Backup\Freenas1
Weekly scrubs are performed


FreeNAS 2 at office 2
FreenNAS1 has a 5TB extent and is mapped VIA iSCSI
Snapshot is performed twice a day with a retention period of six weeks
Snapshots are replicated to FreeNAS1 under the ZFS of Freenas1\Backup\Freenas2
Weekly scrubs are performed

My questions is since I am replicating extent and snapshots to FreeNAS devices will there a be a chance of overwriting the data contained on the Pull? I tried to account for overhead (about a 1TB-2TB of unused space on the entire volumes. But I noticed the extents are 10TB + 5TB so 15TB total being used, are the snapshots stored on the volumes and thus further decreasing the amount of storage? Please let me know if you need further clarification on my question, and thank you for taking the time to answer it. :)

--Matt
If your replication (backup) path differs from your main storage (different volume, dataset or folder) then no, you will not overwrite anything.

Snapshots only use a very little storage. To understand this you better do some reading on them. There is a lot of information about snapshots available see for example chapter 8.2 of the Freenas manual.
 

mattL

Cadet
Joined
Sep 1, 2017
Messages
3
freenas.PNG
If your replication (backup) path differs from your main storage (different volume, dataset or folder) then no, you will not overwrite anything.

Snapshots only use a very little storage. To understand this you better do some reading on them. There is a lot of information about snapshots available see for example chapter 8.2 of the Freenas manual.

Cool thank you for your reply Evertb1, so in the above configuration I have a Volume named Storage, then a dataset name 1Storage created under that volume. Under the 1Storage dataset I have PrimaryStorage for the main office, which contains 10TB extent and is mapped with iSCSI to my file server. Under the SecondaryStorage dataset the PrimaryStorage dataset is replicated over to this server which also contains the extent from my other file server. Under your explanation, this should be the correct setup for replication of two extents between machines.
 

DaveY

Contributor
Joined
Dec 1, 2014
Messages
141
As long as you are only replicating the PrimaryStorage dataset from each of the machines and replicating them to the SecondaryStorage dataset on the other machine, then you should be fine. It all depends on where you write your replicated dataset.

So basically:
Code:
Freenas1:1Storage/PrimaryStorage replicated to Freenas2:1Storage/SecondaryStorage/PrimaryStorage
Freenas2:1Storage/PrimaryStorage replicated to Freenas1:1Storage/SecondaryStorage/PrimaryStorage

I would recommend different dataset names though to prevent confusion. With same names, if you accidentally replicate one level up, you'll clobber your data
 
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