Replication multi-stream

[Zachary Miller]

So I'm a local MSP for a couple smaller businesses. I love FreeNAS and have been using them for onsite backups for Windows Server. Basically setting up iSCSI drive to the server and using native Server Backup. It has been awesome, huge cost savings for my clients, and saved their files a several occasions.

Now comes the fun part. I want to expend my offering to allow them to replicate their data to a FreeNAS I keep at my office for an offsite DR plan. I started playing with this, and it's looking pretty good, but now I hit a big stumbling block that sent me back to the drawing board. Using ZFS replication, the replication doesn't allow more than one replication to run at a time. I can't find anyway to avoid this, as it just times out the other replication task. This causes issues now that I have 3 clients interested and am trying to keep up to daily snapshots of their data.

I see two ways to solve this. One is to find a way to do multiple replication tasks that I'm not aware of today, this is where you geniuses on the forums come in! The other way would be to convert my beefy FreeNAS at my office into a hypervisor, and create a virtual FreeNAS device for each of my clients, so I can do multiple streaming. I kind of like this option as it gives a security realm over top as well to separate the clients, but I know a lot of people cringe at the idea of running FreeNAS on virtual machines. My point is if its only for a replication for off-site backups, I'm not super concerned with IO speeds.

What are your guy's thoughts on this and is there something I'm missing in regards to multiple replications running at the same time?

Thanks a ton!
Zach

 

[Zachary Miller]

Hey FreeNAS users!

I've obviously been doing some digging myself and also want to look into rsync as an option. It would appear that I can run multiple rsync jobs at the same time, but I'm worried about the performance impact this has. Obviously I like the idea of snapshots and replicating only changes blocks because I believe rsync would potentially re-copy the whole backup file. I have to do more digging into how the incremental backup works within Windows Server, but wanted to see if someone might have some more information in this aspect.

I also do incremental for 7 days at the client side, so after 7 days, I have to figure out how it collapses the files, as this could cause a huge change to replicate. I know in Acronis this is a major issue, as after the age date for backups, it re-writes the base image which is hundreds of gigs, making replication a nightmare. Any input on people doing this is more than welcome :)

Thanks!
Zach

 

[dlavigne]

Unfortunately the 9.x series does/will not support multiple replication tasks. I'm not sure if this feature is slated for the 10 series or not.

 

[Zachary Miller]

So with that information I'm down to either creating VM's for each of my clients to do ZFS replication or doing Rsync on each of clients.

I see the ZFS replication on the VM level as a Pro for using ZFS replication so its only block level changes which is nice, but a Con that I'm running multiple VM's of freenas.

I see Rsync as a Pro that I can have a single instance and run multiple "backup" jobs using Cron, but as a Con because it is file level. So with Windows Server Backup creating VHD's each time, depending on the change size it could be quite a large backup and if the full backup ever changed, I'd have to re-sync that whole folder.

Just looking for someone that may have had experience with something similar to this or just your feelings on it.

Appreciate it!
Zach