How to Directly Backup ISCSI Content to another QNAP

[tomf]

Has anyone found a workable solution for this issue? I don't have to have full HA, but being able to switch over to a second onsite NAS and run from there with what has been copied most recently would be a huge step forward.

Does the LUN Backup work for this? I don't want to restore it, I want to be able to run it from its backed up location.

Thanks,

~ Tom

[NinjaActionJeans]

I just picked up two nas's (559 Pro II's) so I'm pretty new to this but I've got a decent solution working using NFS instead of iSCSI.

Using NFS i was able to copy all the vmdk files onto the second nas locally then bring the nas to remote location and sucessfully replicate the vmdk files each night for about a week now(Using rsyn and incremental backup). I have about 500 gigs of vm's right now and the rsync replication took about 4 hours each night over a 5mbit connection. It seemed most of that time was spent calculating the differences between the files rather than actually transfering those differences across the WAN. CPU usage was quite high while doing this but the nas still ran fine.
I succesfully launched the vm's at the remote location and verified that changes in the vm's since the local copy was made are making it to the remote nas.

All of this happens automatically and while the vm's are online.

I know iSCSI performance is better, but nfs works just fine in most applications.

Seems to be a great solution so far. Anybody have any experience using this mehod? If so did you run into any issues over time?

Thx

[tomf]

I was thinking just this morning about using NFS for data stores and seeing if they would be easier to replicate.

Is that what you're doing? Using NFS in VMware instead of iSCSI?

Any other details about your setup? Sounds simple enough.

tks

~ tom

[NinjaActionJeans]

Yup its super simple.....Yes I'm using nfs as my datastore in vmware.

I now have two exact systems at different locations. Basically at each site there is a vmware box and a qnap nas. Each night the entire datastore folder on the main nas replicates to the backup nas using rsync while the vm's are running. At the backup site of course the vm's are powered off awaiting a failure of the main server.

Its been a couple months now and about once a week i power on the vm's at the backup location to check their consistancy, and no issues so far.

I've got 600gb of vm's replicating every night using a 5mbit connection. Working good so far.