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VMWare : Disaster Recovery and Offsite Replication

VMWare : Disaster Recovery and Offsite Replication. An Open Source approach to replication and recovery. Current Challenges:. Miniscule IT Budgets. Backup Tapes don’t meet capacity needs or are costly. Most RAIDs don’t protect from certain data loss. Quick recovery of virtual disks and OS.

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VMWare : Disaster Recovery and Offsite Replication

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  1. VMWare: Disaster Recovery and Offsite Replication An Open Source approach to replication and recovery.

  2. Current Challenges: • Miniscule IT Budgets. • Backup Tapes don’t meet capacity needs or are costly. • Most RAIDs don’t protect from certain data loss. • Quick recovery of virtual disks and OS. • Stuck with same vendor for offsite storage.

  3. Vendor Specific Solutions • Costly; upwards of $60,000 for infrastructure. • Offers features only available to like systems. • Choose Two out of Three: Fast, Reliable, Cheap. • Yearly support costs can damper most IT budgets. • Typical useable storage capacity: 2.8TB with a single shelf, the rest for snapshots and filesystem overhead.

  4. An Open Source Solution • Open Solaris with ZFS and iscsitarget software. • Relatively inexpensive compared to 3rd party vendors • Can mix and match hardware. • ZFS: Virtually unlimited capacity! • Technical creativity when building scripts.

  5. Cons about Opensolaris iSCSI • Not supported by VMware. (yet) • OS and Filesystem Learning curve • Limited to 1gb/s of bandwidth per SAN* (until 10gb/s is released) • No support for MTU 9000 (Jumbo Frames)

  6. Necessary Tools for success. • ZFS File System; /sbin/zpool and /sbin/zfs; snapshots • Iscsitadm (pkg add) • SSH keygen/pgp • A replication script (e.g. zfs-replicate.sh) • Cron • Mail • Enable Vmware LVM/snapshot

  7. What is Zpool/ZFS? • ZFS is a file system designed by Sun Microsystems for the Solaris Operating System. Features include support for high storage capacities (16 exabytes per pool or 16 million terrabytes), snapshots and copy-on-write clones, continuous integrity checking (256bit CRC checks of every block) and automatic repair (scrubbing), RAID-Z and ACLs. (Found on Wiki) • http://opensolaris.org/os/community/zfs/whatis/ • RAID 0 – 5: No protection against silent disk corruption and bit rot. http://blogs.sun.com/bonwick/entry/raid_z • Zpool: disk pool creation, iostatus, and health display (build RAIDZ, RAIDZ2, Jbods, stripes, mirrors, striped mirrors, etc…)

  8. Open Solaris iscsitarget • Uses industry standard iscsi target and initiator calls • Extremely easy to use and seamlessly integrates with Zpool/ZFS • Allows for the creation of soft provisioned disks. • ACL support, deny unwanted initiators. • Iscsitadm list targets –v : details of each currently active targets

  9. Replication Script; Mail; Cron • Many available on the internet • Modified a script from the web (author unknown) to work according to my requirements. Still in progress but works . (zfs-replicate.sh) • Use Cron to execute zfs-replicate on a schedule. • Mail the results to your disk admins.

  10. Vmware Enterprise • Configure VMWare for iSCSI support • Add targets to Vmware host adapters. • Enable LVM snapshot support: GUI far more simpler than console.

  11. Snapshots: How to? • Reserve up to 40% of maximum pool capacity for snapshots, i.e. 10TB pool, 6TB data, 4TB snapshots. Admin discretion and may be less depending on LUN configuration. • Snapshots are the size of the used capacity of the LUN/partition. • Making a snapshot is a breeze! • /sbin/zfs snapshot pool/partition@snapshot • Send the snapshot over to the remote site. • /sbin/zfs send pool/partition@snapshot | sshusername@host \ /sbin/zfsrecv pool/partition

  12. Replication types • ZFS send/recv with SSH (avg. speed: 25MB/s at 256bit encryption) • Slowest replication, doesn’t require dedicated network and secure. • Different algorithms provide different data throughput. • Stunnel may be quicker! • ZFS send/recv with mbuffer (speeds: 80 to 120MB/s Avg: 360Gig/hr) • lev@siscsi-sas:~$ zfs send sd/Linux@1 | mbuffer -b1024k -m 1500m -O 172.32.66.10:9999 ;LOCAL SITE • lev@piscsi-sas:~$ mbuffer -m 1500M -s1024k -I 172.32.66.11:9999 | zfsrecvpdrive/Linux ;REMOTE SITE • http://www.maier-komor.de/mbuffer.html • Must have enough system memory (+4GB) to support large buffers. • Non encrypted, requires network paths to be safe. • ZFS send/recv with netcat/rsh (avg. speed: 35MB/s) • Insecure data copy, just for comparison.

  13. Data Recovery • Activate offsite VM ESX Host. • Access offsite disk storage LUNs. • add iSCSI remote host to Virtual Center • Re-add VM Disk (LUNs) to offsite VM Infrastructure. • GUI: Advanced Features: LVM: EnableResignature • CLI: /proc/vmware/config/LVM/EnableResignature • Resignatured LUNs will appear automatically in the storage section of Virtual Center. • Re-add VM Guests from resignatured LUNs • Offsite LUNs can be added to primary VM site for data recovery or testing...

  14. Questions? Tano Simonian Email: tanniel@ucla.edu (ofc) 310 794 9669

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