Setting up Warm Backup with NE (32 vers 64 bit)

[jrefl5]

I 'm going to setup a Virtual instance of my zimbra server (P2V) but, was wondering if I can setup the backup server using the a 64 bit OS, and 64 bit zimbra, while the primary is running using a 32 bit version?

Example;
Primary using 32 bit Red Hat 5.5 with PAE, and zimbra 6.0.x 32 bit
Backup using 64 bit Red Hat 5.5 and zimbra 6.0.x 64 bit.

What Directories would need to be keep in sync?

   /opt/zimbra/db
                  /store
                  /backup
                  /index
                  /data   ??

Most of the other Directories appear to be code/configs, some can't be synced due to 64/32 differences.

This will most likely serve at some point as a migration from 32, to 64 stepping stone, along with the warm fail over function, We are a LOW volume site, so a small loss of e-mails in a disaster would not be a major problem.

[bdial]

the db, index, and stores are 32 <-> 64 compatable. the only thing that is not is the ldap database. That has to be exported/imported. See this wiki article for info on that

Network Edition: Moving from 32-bit to 64-bit Server - Zimbra :: Wiki

[jrefl5]

Thanks

That looks like a lot of steps to script on two servers, and keep in sync
for a warm stanby setup.

Looks like I might be better using the 32 bit version as a warm backup for now

I can then do a install -s on the new system and "restore" from the production system on a regular basis.

[ewilen]

Are you planning on downing the primary server before syncing?

[jrefl5]

Our mail volume is such that, I think I can get away with regular rysncs (1/H) for fail-over purposes. If I were doing a planed outage of primary then I would then bring it down and rsync over.

Optimum would be to setup DRBD of the filesystems between the two instances of zimbra, and I'm looking into that also.

[ewilen]

I would be wary of rsyncing a live database and expecting it to work in the end.

However, if you just sync the backups and the contents of /opt/zimbra/redolog, you can use NE's restore features to restore from those.