Comments on: Provisioning Disaster Recovery with ZFS, iSCSI and VMware

By: Mike La Spina

Mike La Spina — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 20:15:16 +0000

Hi Greg,

I’m not sure what you mean by “when I snapshot a running vm will it come up alive in esxi” but I assume its about the include memory snapshot option.

If you snapshot a VM and include the memory image you can revert to that snapshot and it will have the same state the machine was in at the point in time the snapshot was created. There are some exceptions to this action. The uuid of the machine and underlying infrastructure cannot change. e.g. CPU model, CDRom client attributes etc..

Generally this would be a manual function after you power the VM back up.

Regards,

Mike

By: Gregory Durham

Gregory Durham — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 17:31:30 +0000

Mike,
Thank you so much for having this blog, it has been incredibly helpful. I am using a solution similar to yours however I have questions about the consistency of the virtual machines. I hope this makes sense, I have two opensolaris machines with a bunch of hard disks, one acts as a iSCSI SAN, and the other is identical other than the hard disk configuration. The only thing being served are VMWare esxi raw disks in physical compatibility mode (no vmware snapshots), which hold either virtual machines(combination of various *nix and windows servers) or data that the particular virtual machine uses, I.E. we have exchange 2007 virtualized and through its iSCSI initiator we are mounting two LUNs one for the database and another for the Logs, all on different arrays of course. Any how we are then snapshotting this data across the SAN network to the other box using snapshot send/recv. In the case the other box fails this box can immediatly serve all of the iSCSI LUNs. The problem, I don’t really know if its a problem…Is when I snapshot a running vm will it come up alive in esxi or do I have to accomplish this in a different way. These snapshots will then be written to tape with bacula.

Thanks,
Greg

By: Mike La Spina

Mike La Spina — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 06:02:36 +0000

Hi,

Are you referring to the one listed here http://blog.laspina.ca/ubiquitous/zfs_snapshot_rollup_bash_script

VM consistency actions like quiescence must be initiated externally from the script. The VMFS volume will be consistant.

Regards,

Mike

By: tranceking

tranceking — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 05:36:34 +0000

when will you have the GFS snapshot script. Also is the vm in a consistent state when the snapshot is taken?

By: Mike La Spina

Mike La Spina — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 16:21:22 +0000

Hi,

That method is fine. NFS is a protocol that also works well when virtualized.

Regards,

Mike

By: Giacomo Marconi

Giacomo Marconi — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 14:24:14 +0000

hi! good work.
I am trying to setup this:
two freenas iscsi target (cause it boot from usb, and I have all disks free).
one vm opensolaris as iscsi initiator with a mirrored zpool using the two iscsi target as devices:

NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
iSCSI ONLINE 0 0 0
mirror ONLINE 0 0 0
c9t3d0p0 ONLINE 0 0 0 first iscsi target
c9t4d0p0 ONLINE 0 0 0 second iscsi target

the opensolaris vm is sharing storage via nfs to vmware vsphere cluster.
At the moment I am working on the failover of the initiator/nfs server and ethernet bonding.

what do you think about this way ?

Giacomo

By: Hany Michael

Hany Michael — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 20:59:42 +0000

Mike,
Great article…I hope I will have the time to test this in my lab one day..
Keep up the good work!