Hi all,
If you want to get right to the question go to paragraph 4.
1. I'm making good progress with VDP, backed by iscsi volumes on ZFS (zvol.) It's a nice solution running free backup software in VDP which has the excellent added benefit of deduplication. It runs on a free open source operating system, OpenIndiana. And the hardware was free since it's running on old pre-virtualization rigs. Plus with ZFS I get snapshots, disc scrub, replication, and iSCSI with multipathing and all kinds of other goodness I haven't gotten into yet!
2. So I've got 2 OI/ZFS rigs. One presents two iscsi volumes to ESXi 5.1 for VDP backup appliances. (Yes, my consistency checks sometimes stop running and CPU tends to creep up eventually requiring a restart - so I check them daily. And I had to work out diskshadow pre-freeze scripts to get application consistent server 2008R2 backups, and I'm still using a workaround for the exchange server. Also I've just passed the first 30 days and I don't *think* the retention profile has gone back and deleted backups it now should have but I'm not ready to say that yet.)
3. A bit bumpy and difficult getting here but I've got reliable-enough daily backups on the VDP appliance and I've succesfully restored a VM so that's pretty good. On the OI box, I take a daily ZFS snapshot of each zvol. I'm not powering off the appliances prior to this zfs snap but as long as I can restore to the last validated consitency check I'll be happy. I've repliacted (locally for now, via zfs send/receive) the seed file system and incremental snapshots for the last week (~2TB!) over to my 2nd OI box and rolled the subsequent zvol to the latest snapshot (although I think that may have been unnecessary) and then presented this zvol to ESXi 5.1 over iSCSI. It was necessary to resignature the LUN to get it to mount but now it has and I can browse the datastore and it looks like I'm good to go.
4. I've got my original VDP appliance LUN and it's SNAP LUN mounted in vCenter. I want to test DR (but not go so far as to setup a new vCenter server if possible.) Without really mucking up vcenter's vdp registrations, can I shut down the original appliance and add the SNAP LUN .vmx to inventory and power it up? It'll be named/configured/registered the same as the original. Will that break stuff? Next steps from there?
5. To get this to work offsite in another location, I think I'll have to first spin up a new vcenter server and register the appliance. Any ideas fleshing out that process? I'd love to be able to handle disaster recovery on that end on the free hypervisor but am I right that can't happen if I've got VDP in the mix?
Thanks in advance,
jb