ZFS Replication from FreeNAS to CentOS / ZFS on Linux

[anodos]

Hey all, I have a problem that I've been working on (mostly brainstorming and doing limited testing in my free-time) for the past few weeks. I'm transitioning an office to using a FreeNAS server for serving up CIFS shares. I had the budget for a second server as a replication target.

The office already has a tape backup rotation using Symantec backup exec (yuck). Backup Exec documentation says that it can work over CIFS, but it doesn't work with any samba server I've set up (the documentation states that they support samba up to something like 3.1- hah). Backup Exec has backup agent software that works with RHEL. I installed it on CentOS and was able to back up a test zpool to tape and restore it. Everything seemed normal. My current backup plan is as follows:

FreeNAS (Server1) --> [ZFS Replication] --> CentOS (Server2) --> [Remote Agent for Linux] --> LTO Tapes

I have the following questions:

• Is ZFS Replication reliable when going from a FreeBSD zpool to a ZFS on Linux zpool and vice-versa
• Does this seem unnecessarily complex? Should I just bite the bullet and switch to Bacula or Amanda? (I'd prefer not to do this because it would require changing something already in production.)
• What am I overlooking?

Obviously, I need to do more rigorous testing of the "CentOS <--> LTO Tapes" portion of the above plan before putting it into production. What do you think would be most likely to break on that portion? ACLs?

By the way, I've already tested the Remote Agent in a linux jail - doesn't work.

 

[dlavigne]

Which solution did you end up using?