/opt/zimbra/backup to NAS box via NFS?

[robertcl]

Currently I run the zimbra backup jobs to the default location on our Zimbra box but am approaching 80% disk capacity and was thinking of offloading the stored backups. I was thinking I could mount a fast NAS box (perhaps a Synology DS1010+ or similar) via NFS and simply change the backup job location. Is anyone doing this that can comment? Other than some performance hit TBD, I'm not really seeing any drawback but perhaps I'm overlooking something.

Thanks,
Rob

[alexkelly]

We have migrated our backups to a NetApp filer that we have mounted via NFS. The NFS volume is mounted at /ZimbraBackup. Then we changed the configuration for the backup location by setting the zimbraBackupTarget attribute with

zmprov mcf zimbraBackupTarget "/ZimbraBackup"

The important thing to note is that if you have multiple mail stores, that configuration is global, so all of your backups will write to that location.

You wouldn't have to modify the configuration though, you could simply mount your NFS volume directly at /opt/zimbra/backup. Or even symlink /opt/zimbra/backup to wherever you have mounted the NFS volume. Any of those will work.

[veronica]

> The important thing to note is that if you have multiple mail stores, that configuration is global, so all of your backups will write to that location.

Would not agree with this comment though. Every server has its configuration for backup. Need to modify setting for respective server as below:

zmprov ms `zmhostname` zimbraBackupTarget /tmp/backup

[robertcl]

Originally Posted by alexkelly

We have migrated our backups to a NetApp filer that we have mounted via NFS. The NFS volume is mounted at /ZimbraBackup. Then we changed the configuration for the backup location by setting the zimbraBackupTarget attribute with


The important thing to note is that if you have multiple mail stores, that configuration is global, so all of your backups will write to that location.

You wouldn't have to modify the configuration though, you could simply mount your NFS volume directly at /opt/zimbra/backup. Or even symlink /opt/zimbra/backup to wherever you have mounted the NFS volume. Any of those will work.

Thanks for the feedback.

Are you connected to the NFS volume via Gigabit ethernet? What kind of throughput are you seeing on your backup jobs? Right now I'm seeing about 12GB per minute (about 1600Mb/s) on the local backup. Obviously, this is way beyond even wirespeed max of gigE of 1000Mb/s but if I can get half that, I'd be satisfied for now.

[Klug]

Backing up to a server used as NFS NAS through gigabit. There are six 1.5 TB 5400rpm disks on this NAS, in RAID10.
No specific NFS tuning, out of the box NFSv4.

Here are the backup stats :

Label:   full-20100313.000005.783
Type:    full
Status:  completed
Started: Sat, 2010/03/13 01:00:05.783 CET
Ended:   Sat, 2010/03/13 04:24:57.955 CET
Redo log sequence range: 3729 .. 3729
Number of accounts: 218

and

$ du -h full-20100313.000005.783
...
262G    full-20100313.000005.783

That's about 1 GB per minute. Not very fast 8)