[Cialug] VMs & Replication

[L. V. Lammert]

On Fri, 18 Mar 2011, Matthew Nuzum wrote:

> On Fri, Mar 18, 2011 at 12:19 PM, Matthew Steven <matthew at geniusweb.com>wrote:
>
> As an Ubuntu user, I've found the easiest way for me to get this working is
> to install Debian in my Dom0.
>
Normally I prefer SuSE, .. however Debian is a good 2nd choice.

> Matt, you take the snapshots outside of the VM? Doesn't that cause potential
> for consistency problems?
>
Intersting question, .. it would *appear* that VBox has the edge with v4 -
snapshots, migration, and a WebUI (phpVBoxAdmin); it would also seem more
prudent to do snaptshots from inside the VM environment?

The other piece that is missing is management, i.e. after sync'ing the
snapshot to the failover location, what would be the best way to handle
bring up the DR site?

> Lee, I know everyone hates it when people ask if you're sure you really want
> what you say you want, but is OS level replication the best choice for you?
>
As this is a DR application, the ability to 'turn on' the DR site seems to
point at snapshots as the only viable option; the other option is drbd,
which does seem to have updated a lot since we last looked at it.

> (i.e. filesystem snapshots) For example, if I have a file server I might
> replicate to S3 or Walrus or use rsync at regular intervals. If I was
> hosting a database I might do frequent SQL dumps or set up replication.
>
For a hotsite application, that is actually couterproductive - the file
sizes would be much bigger compared to either a snapshot or block-level
replication.

	Lee