Forums

Home / Forums

You need to log in to create posts and topics. Login · Register

Backup question

I have a few ISCSi vmware datastores on my petasan. I would like to sync them to another storage array using iscsi. What is the best way to do this?

"BEST" is hard to define. It is something you will have to decide.

What we have been doing is an rsync between iscsi storages at the hypervisor. This works as the hypervisor can see both stores and makes a copy to the backup store.

However, the latest Petasan release has a backup built in. We are currently testing this ourselves and are working on finalizing testing to commission it to replace our current vm stores and backup method.

Hello first post, I am running the new version (test environment) and I am wondering how it will work as well, I see the backup option in the on boarding process, so I guess hypothetically speaking I can add a cluster as a backup repository off of my existing cluster?

Cluster A is running Vmware and several 100 virtual machines etc etc

Cluster B is empty and has enough space to be a backup for A

Cluster A (datacenter five 100TB servers operating....)

Cluster B (remote datacenter 3 servers 200tb over 1GBPS vpn)

 

all of this is explained in the replication guide mostly I suppose except for the bandwidth limitations...

 

 

 

Quote from Shiori on June 13, 2019, 9:13 pm

"BEST" is hard to define. It is something you will have to decide.

What we have been doing is an rsync between iscsi storages at the hypervisor. This works as the hypervisor can see both stores and makes a copy to the backup store.

However, the latest Petasan release has a backup built in. We are currently testing this ourselves and are working on finalizing testing to commission it to replace our current vm stores and backup method.

Can you provide a copy of the script. Do you just run the script as a cron job. How often do you run it?

Quote from R3LZX on June 13, 2019, 10:01 pm

Hello first post, I am running the new version (test environment) and I am wondering how it will work as well, I see the backup option in the on boarding process, so I guess hypothetically speaking I can add a cluster as a backup repository off of my existing cluster?

Cluster A is running Vmware and several 100 virtual machines etc etc

Cluster B is empty and has enough space to be a backup for A

Cluster A (datacenter five 100TB servers operating....)

Cluster B (remote datacenter 3 servers 200tb over 1GBPS vpn)

 

all of this is explained in the replication guide mostly I suppose except for the bandwidth limitations...

 

 

 

I like the idea of that but I do not have the hardware to stand up another cluster.

Just to clarify, version 2.3 adds support for (async) replication, this is different than backups. Backups will be supported in 2.4. This was stated in the guides/release notes. Maybe the fact that in the ui we give the role of replication/backup service could be a source of confusion, in 2.4 this service will take care of both replication and backups, but in 2.3 it is just replication.

backup is a wide area, first we made sure PetaSAN works well with industry standard tools like Veeam, it has worked well for a while, but in 2.3 we enhanced support for iSCSI xcopy performance to reach up 400 MB/s per disk using Veeam:

2.4 will add support for PetaSAN being a backup engine storing to local storage/ftp/sftp/AWS target destinations.

we also have plans in the longer term to support the VSS hardware provider api, this will allow VMWare and Veeam to orchestrate backup of multiple Windows vms stored on PetaSAN with application level consistency as opposed to crash consistent backups.

In my setup. Petasan is the source and I have another storage vendor as the destination. Can I setup petasan to async to a target iscsi volume? Ideally I would like to sync an entire VMware datastore to my old storage array.

Backups will be added in 2.4 saving to local drive/sftp/aws. you should be able to manually configure iscsi client on your PetaSAN backup node and create a local drive backup.