So... zvol backups safe guarding vms ?

[sesipod]

Hello all!

So I'm sure this has been asked just at a million times but is there currently a way to backup zvol's that are made for VMs ?
I would like to take a backup of the vms to a secondary FreeNAS server or to a separate Drive Pool on the same server.

All of my vms are currently on my SSD Pool

FreeNAS 11

SSD x2 250 GB Pool - Raid 0
HDD x9 3 TB Pool - Raidz2

Thanks!

Any links to existing Threads would be fine I'm currently looking for any info that I can :)
I have done a few google searches but I can't really find anything helpful.

 

[toadman]

Yes, many threads on it. Here is one of them... https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/vmware-snapshots.28411/

I would think you'd want to set up a Vmware-Snapshot for the zvol holding the vmware datastore. Then, after the zvol snapshot occurs, replicate the zvol snapshot to whatever other pool/dataset you want. Assuming you want to automate the process, in FreeNAS you would:

1. configure a Vmware-Snapshot* for your vcenter or esxi host that points at the datastore resident on the zvol,
2. configure a Periodic Snapshot Task of the zvol,
3. configure a Replication Task that shoots the zvol snapshots over to your backup pool

I think the procedure is discussed in the docs pretty well.

*NOTE: vmware (vcenter or esxi) will not snapshot any VM that is powered on and has PCI-Passthrough configured. (Unless something changed recently that I'm not aware of.)

 

[sesipod]

@toadman I guess I should say that I'm currently using FreeNAS for my vms not an ESXI host :p

 

[sesipod]

So I guess that I got it working after checking.

1. Created Periodic Snapshot Task
2. Created Replication Task - To copy the Snapshot to a secondary Dataset on the same FreeNAS box :p


Created Periodic Snapshot Task

 

[sesipod]

Created Replication Task

 

[sesipod]

Seems to have worked

 

[farmerpling2]

and then test it by restoring it to another spare drive to see if it can be used and then thrown away.

 

[toadman]

Yes, the snapshot and replication will work. And it looks like you set it up properly!

The issue is you *might* have a problem with the VM on a restore because the file system was not quiesced when the snapshot of the zvol happened. So you might have a VM on a particular snapshot not synced with the underlying storage (zvol). I'm not familiar enough with freenas VMs to know if this is or might be an issue.

I do know this potential issue (on vmware) is why the freenas team implemented the "Vmware-Snapshot" feature. I have no idea if something similar might be necessary on a freenas hosted vm. Hopefully someone else with knowledge can chime in. Maybe it's not an issue at all in freenas.

 

[sesipod]

Thanks all for your posts I am in the process of a server upgrade. So I will continue on this once I upgrade to the new hardware :)