[ILUG] Mirroring a filesystem across a network

[Brendan Minish]

One thing that you may wish to consider is using LVM (perhaps in
combination with DRDB)

the big advantage with LVM is that you can snapshot the file system,
make a consistent backup then delete the snapshot when done 


On Thu, 2011-02-10 at 16:17 +0000, Brian O'Mahony wrote:
> Im purchasing two new servers to replace our current Clearcase
> infrastructure and was wondering has anyone got any suggestions on how
> to do this. Here is a quick overview of what I need to do:
> 
> Primary server has a filesystem with active VOBs. These are open files,
> and range from a few hundred megs to about 80GB.
> 
> I want the backup server to have a mirrored copy of this data (which
> wouldn't be open, or active files), so there would be no need to lock
> them (like we do in our current environment) so that these can be
> tarred up, and then archived to tape. Or even possibly lock these on
> the secondary server (may be needed if it is realtime sync), tarred
> unlocked, and then updated.
> 
> Preferably I would like to have a realtime mirror. However this may not
> be possible. I have done some reading on DRDB but from what I surmise,
> the data is not accessible on the second server until the primary goes
> offline.
> 
> The data will never need to be accessed from the secondary server with
> the exception of tarring the files. If the primary goes down, this data
> probably still wouldn't be used, as we would recover the data to the
> previous night's backup, and then resync from a site replica, which at
> worst would be out by 6 minutes.
> 
> We cannot use the site replica to backup, as to restore involves quite
> a lot of changing the configuration on the site, as you are restoring
> and would increase restore time dramatically.
> 
> I also thought about running an rsync, as the data doesn't nessisarily
> need to be a mirror copy. While a mirror copy would be nice, an rsync
> before the tarring of files would be enough. However im not sure of the
> does and donts of using rsyn on open files, and also due to the fact
> the largest files (70Gb) would probably have changed during its own
> rsync.
> 
> Im wondering if anyone has any thoughts on this? Our will I have to
> stay with our current method of locking the files on the Primary,
> tarring, copying them to the backup and then off to archive.
> 
> Any suggestions are more than welcome.
> 
> Regards
> 
> B
> 
> 
> 
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