Xen project Mailing List

Re: [Xen-users] Backup running Windows machines - redundancy

To: Bart Coninckx <bart.coninckx@xxxxxxxxxx>

From: "Fajar A. Nugraha" <list@xxxxxxxxx>

Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2011 16:34:10 +0700

Cc: Paul Piscuc <paul.piscuc@xxxxxxxxxx>, James Harper <james.harper@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Guido Hecken <guido.hecken@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Mike Sun <msun@xxxxxxxxxx>, xen-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Delivery-date: Fri, 11 Feb 2011 01:35:20 -0800

List-id: Xen user discussion <xen-users.lists.xensource.com>

On Fri, Feb 11, 2011 at 4:19 PM, Bart Coninckx <bart.coninckx@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Friday 11 February 2011 09:56:47 Fajar A. Nugraha wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 11, 2011 at 3:50 PM, Paul Piscuc <paul.piscuc@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > Again, the purpose of this thread is to find an incremental backup
> > solution. DD and other methods work fine, but you cannot do daily backups
> > on 8 machines with 100GB storage, and keep those backups for a week or
> > more. Also, if one would like to restore a single file from the image,
> > things will get ugly.
>
> The "easy" solution form your problem is zfs :)
>
> Have you considered using a separate storage server, with
> nexenta/solaris/whatever-os-that-supports-zfs, and exporting them to your
> dom0 using iscsi?

Fajar,

you mean because of it's snapshotting capabilities?

snapshot and clone, to be exact.

Would you have the DomU
live on this filesystem and snapshot it like that?

domU will use zvol as a block device (instead of the usual LVM or partition).

The zvol can be on the on the dom0 (if you're "brave" enough to use zfsonlinux) or iscsi-imported from the storage server (which can run any OS that officially support zfs).

Does this work faster than

LVM snapshots (I noticed a horrible performance drop)?

The performance drop will be there (compared to LVM), but it might or might not be acceptible depending on your needs.

If you want a supported system (and possibly someone which can help you size your system to meet your I/O performance needs) then a separate storage using nexenta/Sun Unified Storage (or even netapp) might be better.

And what about the
problem of integrity?

If you're already using lvm snapshot, then the consistency/integrity is the same.

If the application can recover a power failure, then it can recover it's data using the snapshot/clone.

Fajar

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