> On Wednesday 12 September 2007 17:03, David Boyes wrote:
> > I'm not sure I understand you completely. If you have a storage pool
> > defined in one SD and another storage pool defined in a separate SD,
you
> > should be able to migrate from one SD to the other, as long as the
> > director in a particular instance knows about both SDs. We do that
now,
> > and it seems to work OK (particularly if you migrate from a disk
pool in
> > one location to a disk pool in the central location and then migrate
to
> > tape at the central location). We run a separate SD on a different
port
> > for each satellite location.
> 
> I guess I don't understand what you are saying above, because it
sounds
> like
> you can write a backup to SD1, then do a migration job that reads the
> volume
> on SD1 and writes it to SD2.   Is that what you are doing?  and if so,
can
> you explain how?

The scenario is: one director (dir1) on host1, one SD (sd1) on host2,
second SD (sd2) on host3. Both SDs contain specific storage pools
(disk-based pool1 on host1, tape-based pool2 on host2), and are defined
to the director in the normal way, specifying TCP hostname and port in
the SD resource definition. The nextpool value for pool1 points to
pool2.

Backups controlled by dir1 go from client FD to pool1 as normal.
Migration job on dir1 is scheduled as normal. Dir1 reads volumes in
pool1 and migrates them to pool2. Dir1 knows that pool1 is managed by
sd1, and pool2 is managed by sd2, and how to communicate with the
appropriate SD. So far, it seems to just work. Dir1 schedules mounts
from pool1 and pool2, copies data, and updates the catalog just like
it's supposed to.

If we have a large remote location, we can add a local SD (sd3) to the
picture. Client backups at the remote site go to a disk pool controlled
by sd3, and then to a pool on sd1, then to a pool on sd2 via normal
migration. The director in control of the process could run on a local
machine at the remote location and control the local and remote SDs, or
the director could run on host1 remotely and control the SDs (the amount
of network traffic generated by a director is miniscule compared to the
traffic from FD to SD, and migration can be controlled in a way that the
network utilization is more friendly). 

For us, the whole idea relies on the ability to easily separate Bacula
functions onto separate hosts and that pools (and thus pool volumes) are
associated with a SD (this is one reason why I argued about this
strongly a while back -- that jobs should deal always and only with
pools, and let the pool selection determine what SD and device is
needed). What we can't do yet is share the SDs between director
instances (eg have dir2 talk to sd1 and sd2; the SDs get confused about
whose database to update). Each director we create needs a separate set
of SDs to talk to, either by sitting on a different TCP port or on a
different machine at the usual port.

This works well for us because in our case host1, host2 and host3 are
Linux virtual machines on the mainframe and we can create new machines
easily and attach virtual tape drives from the VTS to any virtual
machine in a controlled manner via the VM tape daemon in contrib/vm. The
creation of a new "Bacula server image" is a matter of cloning a
template of a virtual machine (about 17 seconds) and doing a small
amount of customization for the appropriate Bacula component (eg,
director) role it will serve. We also have memory-speed virtual networks
between the SD images and the director, so network data transfer isn't
really an issue for us (the traffic stays inside the mainframe). 

I'm not sure how well our setup would work with physical machines.
Running the SDs on different ports would get to be a pain to manage, and
you'd need a external arbiter tool controlling access to physical drives
that most Unix systems don't have. 

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft
Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2005.
http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse0120000070mrt/direct/01/
_______________________________________________
Bacula-users mailing list
Bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users

Reply via email to