general/other Asking for advice and personal experiences on cloning / moving servers.

iPodClassic

iPodClassic

I have a FreeBSD 15 server running Sylve with several virtual machines with services on them. I would like to create a backup / HA server on a different machine. These two servers are completely different equipment, both based on x86 architecture but different CPUs, different hard drive capacities, etc.
I would like to know what's the best course of action to clone my active main server onto the other machine despite their differences. Should I simply install FreeBSD on the server as the hypervisor and then dd the rest of the directories for Sylve and the rest of the applications? Or what is the recommended course of action by people who have gone through this situation?

In other words: I would like to have a standby backup server that I can turn up on demand and/or periodically get's copied with all the info from the main server and then goes back to sleep, since my case scenario forgives one or two days of missing backups/data.

Thank you so very much in advance.
 
Why would you use dd? Simply rsync the VMs over.

Caveat: strictly speaking it isn't safe to copy the underlying raw device of a running machine.
 
Which file system is on the FreeBSD 15 server and backup / HA server? UFS2 or ZFS?

Do both servers required a secure connection (e.g. they are connected via internet) or can the connection be insecure (e.g. both servers are on a local network)?
 
cracauer@ said:
Why would you use dd? Simply rsync the VMs over.

Caveat: strictly speaking it isn't safe to copy the underlying raw device of a running machine.
Click to expand...
I would like to clone the complete server, not just the VMs. But yeah , rsync sounds like a much elegant solution. I was just worried a bit or permission might be changed and the “backup” server doesn’t work. But that’s just me being lazy and not testing everything thoroughly 😁
Thank you so much for the advice! I think I will take the rscync route as recommended. Thank you !
 
T-Daemon said:
Which file system is on the FreeBSD 15 server and backup / HA server? UFS2 or ZFS?

Do both servers required a secure connection (e.g. they are connected via internet) or can the connection be insecure (e.g. both servers are on a local network)?
Click to expand...
Both ZFS. Both in the same LAN. Are you think of snapshots? 🧐
 
iPodClassic said:
Both ZFS. Both in the same LAN. Are you think of snapshots? 🧐
Click to expand...
Yes, I was thinking of such a use case (snapshot and send full/incremental relevant datasets from the production server, receive on the standby server).

Or, perhaps a better option is to use a specialized filesystem mirroring tool (easier to set up), like sysutils/cpdup for example (built-in ssh(1) support). I prefer it over net/rsync (I find it easier to handle, see cpdup(1) ).

With ssh keys the whole process can be scripted without user interaction, in both cases.
 
T-Daemon said:
Yes, I was thinking of such a use case (snapshot and send full/incremental relevant datasets from the production server, receive on the standby server).

Or, perhaps a better option is to use a specialized filesystem mirroring tool (easier to set up), like sysutils/cpdup for example (built-in ssh(1) support). I prefer it over net/rsync (I find it easier to handle, see cpdup(1) ).

With ssh keys the whole process can be scripted without user interaction, in both cases.
Click to expand...
Thank you! Will definitely be looking into cpdup ASAP! Thanks again!
 
zpool-split(8). then move ste split-off disks to the new server, verify everything works, sync the delta to the new server via zfs-send(8)|zfs-recv(8), shutdown the old server (or only the vms/jails) and boot up the new server.
If all works as expected, re-attach the disks from the old server to the new one and resilver the pool.


(yes, I am assuming you are using mirrored vdevs, because that's what you should *always* use, unless you have very urgent reasons not to. If you have those reasons you also already know how to migrate those pools.)
 
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