Zimbra, Xen5.6SP2, Netapp - Best way to backup

[leog21]

Hi,

We have Zimbra NE on Xen5.6SP2 (upgrading to 6 soon) hosted on a Netapp LUN over Fiber Channel. We already have NE backups but I'd like to use the snapshot features of the SAN. In order to have clean snapshots, zimbra mysql must be paused or stopped.

Currently I'm doing this with a script, where it does a simple zmcontrol stop, ssh into netapp, runs a snapshot command, zmcontrol start, but I'm wondering if anybody else is doing it in a different way?


Thanks,
Leo

[LMStone]

Lots of flame wars on SAN-level snapshots versus XenServer snapshots...

In our experience, XenServer snapshots use more storage space (and take longer to create, unless your XenCenter machine is on the same bandwidth network as your SAN) but are more readily accessible when things go wrong.

Since SAN prices have come way down over the past few years, we allocate near 100% of the SAN's storage as SRs to compensate somewhat and do snapshots only in XenServer.

If however, the client is doing SAN replication over a WAN, then we also include some SAN-level snapshots.

Still, disk is disk, and disk is ignorant of data stored in RAM, so unless you flush everything in RAM to disk and stop changes from being made, your snapshots may/will not be internally logically consistent and therefore not restorable. The safest way to quiesce a Zimbra system is, unfortunately, "zmcontrol stop".

Your other option is to forget about snapshots and instead take NE Incremental backups several times throughout the day. Really, the tricky bit to backing up a live system is having MySQL and the contents of the mailstore in the backup in alignment.

Hope that helps,
Mark

[leog21]

Thank you for your reply Mark.