Server Farm
We have been working over time to come up with a solid backup solution that does not break the bank and makes sure that our data is redundant, recoverable, multiple copies and multiple sites.
The servers left to right – our Smoothwall router/firewall, our VMware Esxi host and our primary Openfiler iscsi target. The combination of these machines have proven a reliable and cost effective solution for our church. More on this set up another day.
Our virtual file server has two nic’s one dedicated to general network traffic and on dedicated to iscsi traffic on a different subnet, providing quick access, low processor overhead and the ability to scale well. Also giving us the ability to change out the virtual server very quickly if the need would arise or to move to vmotion when we are ready.
Visionman backup box
Enter our Visionman backup box, a low cost box from TigerDirect with sata drives to match our primary Openfiler iscsi target. It is also an Openfiler box running as an iscsi target. To build and use Openfiler as a iscsi traget you will want some great direction and the Microsoft iscsi initiator software.
Now we have an outline of the parts, which happen to be in different building of our church plant, linked by gigabyte Ethernet, it is time to make a backup and an offsite backup as well.
Running the MS iscsi initiator on our virtual file server we map the primary iscsi target as the D: drive and the backup iscsi target as the E: drive. We use the command line program called ROBOCOPY with the following commands to mirror the primary target to the secondary target on a predetermined schedule.
>robocopy d: e: /B /SEC /MIR /R:02 /W:05 /LOG:c:Robocopylast.txt
The switches:
/B – backup mode (will copy all files if run as an administrator)
/SEC – copies security settings
/MIR – makes a mirror copy of the drive
/R – tries to read the file twice and /W – waits five seconds between reads
/LOG – make a log file of the last run
Ok, we have copy one of all the data that is store on on server now copied to another building on our campus. Enter the third computer. Don’t laugh…..
Half laptop
Mr. Half Laptop was recovered after a theft of several computers at our church. Robert, just can’t seem to part with this little guy. Mr. HL has taken a lick or two and just keeps running. Linux is the operating system of choice right now and he even does double duty with some audio duties. A post for another day.
But this half laptop running linux request a rsync session with another linux computer that is not in our facility. This rsync session goes out of our building on a secure ssl connection and copies the changed contents of the backup iscis target to the remote location.
I have to give props to Russ for technical thought and Robert for mad Linux and box build skills.
