backup VM backup server build advice

[Vojczejk]

Hello!

I got assigned the job of building a backup server for multiple virtual machines. I am looking for some advice regarding building such backup server, what i should not do, what are common points of failure and such.

 

At the moment I have available a SuperMicro X8DT3 server (1xXeon E5504, 4GB ECC RAM), a plethora of 146GB ST3146356SS hard drives, which are probably going to be used just for the OS, then i have 8x1.5TB ST31500341AS drives, which i would like to use for the actual backup. The server will be running Bacula backup software, and the OS will be Debian jessie. The RAIDs should be probably done on software bases, the board is not equipped with any additional controller and the loss of whole array would fuck things up pretty bad.

 

My questions:
- The server is currently running off only one of the 146GB drives. I also have another one of the same kind plugged in but not configured. How do i make a RAID 1 of the disk currently used and the clean one, containing the OS?

- The 8 1.5TB drives should be good but need to be verified. How to properly check they are good? Should they be subjected to some kind of torture test and a long SMART test? Or is there some other proper way?

  My current approach is to do a short SMART test using smartctl, then alternate between dding over whole drive and a series of bonnie++ benchmarks for 24h and then long SMART test which should not show any significant problems.

- Any other tips and tricks or good practices when it comes to setting up said type of server?

 

Thanks for all input!

 

EDIT:

Forgot to mention i do not have physical access 24/7 to it. 99% of the time i have only SSH connection.

Edited November 14, 2016 by Vojczejk
Added info about access

[Electronics Wizardy]

1. the easy way is to reinstall if you can. If not, make a image of the drive on the 1.5tb's and then make a raid 1 on the motherboard, then copy back.

2.Smart, check if its fine. Then badblocks -wsv. This will do 4 writes of the drives and show if there are any read or write errors and make sure the data that is read is the same as the data that was written.

3. Tips: Id setup a Raid z2 with zfs on these drives for the raid.

[Vojczejk]

Somewhere I read that ZFS has some troubles on linux and i should go for ZFS only if using Solaris or BSD, what do you think?

[samiscool51]

if you are running windows server, this is available with hyper-v and storage pools

i don't know enough about it and it works and how to set it up and configure it

but ask @leadeater he might have some pointers on how to do this

 

[FroTo]

9 hours ago, Vojczejk said:

Somewhere I read that ZFS has some troubles on linux and i should go for ZFS only if using Solaris or BSD, what do you think?

ZFS is slower but not worse. The reason being is that OpenZFS was designed originally for Solaris, and in order to convert Syscalls and Kernel Function calls it uses a software abstraction library. (Not an expert on this topic though)

[Mikensan]

There's some solid support now for btrfs. I'm not familiar with linux all that much, but mdadm should be able to handle your software raid needs. Ideally make sure your motherboard's disk controller is in no way in a "raid mode". You would at some point want to get an HBA (like the IBM M1015 / LSI flash in IT).

 

As for testing there may be some burn in testing you can do for the whole system, might have to search for some ideas - my knowledge is pretty old. Hopefully looking up server burn in testing gets you somewhere.

 

Seems like you got a pretty solid idea of where you're going, let us know how it goes!

[Vojczejk]

21 hours ago, samiscool51 said:

if you are running windows server, this is available with hyper-v and storage pools

i don't know enough about it and it works and how to set it up and configure it

but ask @leadeater he might have some pointers on how to do this

 

I did mention that the server will be running Debian jessie, that means no Windows.

[samiscool51]

3 hours ago, Vojczejk said:

I did mention that the server will be running Debian jessie, that means no Windows.

oh, umm....

i can't help you there, i'm useless with linux servers

but maybe you can setup a backup interval on the backup server to copy the VM's virtual disk files to itself

but apart from that i don't know what else is available for this type of thing in linux