Forum Discussion

AAlmroth's avatar
AAlmroth
Level 6
14 years ago

VxFS checkpoints in Solaris non-global zones?

We are looking about for ways to use VxFS checkpoints for a file system mounted in a non-global zone, but as the VRTSvxfs package is hollow, no vxfs related commands exist in the zone. Preferrab...
Best Practice
business continuity
Solaris
Storage Foundation
  • AAlmroth's avatar
    AAlmroth
    14 years ago
    An update: The VxFS filesystems are present in the global zone but not visible with the df command, but they are present when running mount command. This enables us to run fsckptadm in the global zone for the file systems "mounted" and used within the zones.

    The downside is that, as we run the applications on a 3 node VCS cluster, we don't know for sure on which physical node the application is running at the moment without some scripting. We are looking at using a NBU policy which starts the job on all three nodes, and a pre-snapshot script, checking with VCS whether the application service group is on that node. If it is not, the script does nothing (and the backup will be of zero bytes). If the application is present, an ssh script session in to the zone, run the quisce, and then checkpoint/backup continues in the global zone. Another downside is that the backup will be cataloged as run on the physical node, and not the virtual name used by the application, but we think with documention, the ops staff can work around this upon potential restores.

    So: problem solved...

    It would certainly be a very nice feature in NBU if it could be made zone aware and integration with the global zone when using VxFS checkpoints/snapshots... Sort of an off-host backup but local on the physical box... :-)

    /A
AAlmroth's avatar
AAlmroth
Level 6
14 years ago
An update: The VxFS filesystems are present in the global zone but not visible with the df command, but they are present when running mount command. This enables us to run fsckptadm in the global zone for the file systems "mounted" and used within the zones.

The downside is that, as we run the applications on a 3 node VCS cluster, we don't know for sure on which physical node the application is running at the moment without some scripting. We are looking at using a NBU policy which starts the job on all three nodes, and a pre-snapshot script, checking with VCS whether the application service group is on that node. If it is not, the script does nothing (and the backup will be of zero bytes). If the application is present, an ssh script session in to the zone, run the quisce, and then checkpoint/backup continues in the global zone. Another downside is that the backup will be cataloged as run on the physical node, and not the virtual name used by the application, but we think with documention, the ops staff can work around this upon potential restores.

So: problem solved...

It would certainly be a very nice feature in NBU if it could be made zone aware and integration with the global zone when using VxFS checkpoints/snapshots... Sort of an off-host backup but local on the physical box... :-)

/A