[Freeipa-users] backing up and restoring the backend

[Steven Jones]

Hi,

"save a copy of the disk image"

When you have 500 servers and the average is 90gb that's a bit of a space problem to copy multiple images of.....but VMWare can clone live.....you dont have to switch off. Also for management purposes you want one way to back everything up or you cant scale your backup system/capability.....

Snapshots are really like db logs its not something you leave for long because of the disk space impacts and disk i/o impacts, you also cant live migrate VMs while a snapshot is in place....I'd be surprised in LVM is more effective/efficient than VMWare in this respect.....

If the backupdb.pl gives me a sane export into a flat file that is fine....many dbs are done that way anyway, its very unlikely it will ever be needed.

regards

Steven Jones

Technical Specialist - Linux RHCE

Victoria University, Wellington, NZ

0064 4 463 6272

________________________________________
From: Simo Sorce [simo at redhat.com]
Sent: Saturday, 1 October 2011 2:28 a.m.
To: Steven Jones
Cc: dpal at redhat.com; freeipa-users at redhat.com; Deon Lackey
Subject: Re: [Freeipa-users] backing up and restoring the backend

On Thu, 2011-09-29 at 22:58 +0000, Steven Jones wrote:
> VM?
>
> VMWare snapshot?
>
> VMWare snapshots are best described as spawn of the devil, they should
> have a life of 2 or 3 days max....

I use KVM so I can't tell how good/bad VMWare fares in this regard, but
I didn't mean VM snapshot, sorry if I was unclear.

I literally meant you turn off the VM and save a copy of the disk image.

It may not be the most efficient way of course, and you can also simply
use normal backup software with disaster recovery functionality.
As long as it is able to properly deal with dirsrv database it should be
fine.

> One of my next Qs was what else needs backing up....however I assumed
> that everything else outside the database is simple to back up.....its
> just "files"
>
> or is this not the case?

Everything but dirsrv databases is just files, that is correct.

Simo.

--
Simo Sorce * Red Hat, Inc * New York