[Freeipa-users] backup plan

[bin.echo at gmail.com]

@Steven Jones
I prefer a pure FOSS solution that has good community support.

@Lucas Yamanishi
I will check out the links.

This weekend I played around with VirtualBox and I was surprised how much
script-ability it has. I'd previously only used it in a desktop/GUI context
so I was not up to speed on all it's automation features.  VirtualBox is a
hosted hypervisor but that doesn't bother me. Machines are so powerful
these days a little overhead isn't a big deal... plus having a host OS
opens up a lot of possibilities.   libvirt looks super powerful but there
is a lot of overlap with the management tools already in VirtualBox. I
might not need anything more.

One of the tests I did was exporting the VM and doing a binary delta on
it against a previous full backup ( the full backup is basically the
pristine VM of the freshly installed and synced replica) . It takes a while
to run but the diff packs the backup down quite a bit. It's not a native
snapshot but after some though I realized that's not really what I want.
The desire is backups with some type of check pointing, to allow for fast
recovery and a few fall back options. I would not ever actually use the
snapshot since this is just for disaster recovery.  The ability to rebuild
the VM in it's latest state is the primary goal, the secondary goals being
simplicity and frugality of storage use.

The nice thing about the scheme is on a minimal install the full backup
plus several delta files will easily fit on a DVD. The deltas can be sent
offsite easily as they are not very large.

Still plenty more research and testing to do but so far this seems like a
workable scheme to facilitate "back up everything"  without using much
storage and in a way I can get my head around.

-Aaron

On Mon, Aug 13, 2012 at 6:16 PM, Lucas Yamanishi <lyamanishi at sesda2.com>wrote:

> The libvirt range of tools works very well with KVM, and with
> virt-manager, they are easy to setup on the desktop or from a remote
> desktop.  QEMU-KVM suports the QCOW2 and LVM storage back-ends, both of
> which have snapshot capabilities, and the virsh tool makes it easy and
> scriptable.  They are all licensed under the GPL or LGPL.
> http://libvirt.org  http;//linux-kvm.org http://qemu.org
>
> If you're using a Red Hat-based distribution, installing them should be
> as easy as "yum install libvirtd virt-manager qemu-kvm" or similar.
>
> -----
> *question everything*learn something*answer nothing*
> ------------
> Lucas Yamanishi
> ------------------
> Systems Administrator, ADNET Systems, Inc.
> NASA Space and Earth Science Data Analysis (606.9)
> 7515 Mission Drive, Suite A100
> Lanham, MD 20706 * 301-352-4646 * 0xE23F3D7A
>
>
> On 08/13/2012 07:14 PM, bin.echo at gmail.com wrote:
> > Hi all,
> >
> > I've been doing a bit of research on back up and restore of FreeIPA and
> > so far the best plan seems to be "just back up everything"
> >
> > That's fine except for "back up everything" doesn't lend itself to
> > automation on a bare metal instance (which is what my primary and
> > replica are). To be safe I would need to take the machine down rather
> > than try to do a hot back up. (sync everything and backup from an
> > inactive fs of better yet unmounted fs)
> >
> > That got me thinking, how about a vm? They are easy to stop, checkpoint,
> > back up and restart.
> >
> > I want to run this by everyone and see what you think:
> >
> > Install a replica on a vm and then use THAT to capture "back ups".
> >
> > If it looks like a reasonable idea, does anyone have a suggestion for
> > which hypervisor would be best to use? (preferably FOSS)  I only have
> > experience with VirtualBox but I'm not sure it's up to this type of
> project?
> >
> > Thanks!
> >
> > -Aaron
> >
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Freeipa-users mailing list
> > Freeipa-users at redhat.com
> > https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/freeipa-users
> >
>
>
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