topic Re: DRD Available for Linux? Rapid OS Fall Back Schemes? in Operating System - Linux

DRD Available for Linux? Rapid OS Fall Back Schemes?

Alzhy — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 15:54:42 GMT

Hola...

We're trying to administrate Linux Environments in the same (or close as possible) fashion as our UNIX environments. In the area of OS Backups - Is there such a thing like DRD that is uber-useful on HP-UX 11.31 environments? Or anything close to DRD that will allow us to have a fallback OS at least in case the main one fails due to human error or bad patching, etc...?

We're also thinking of having a backup vg00 (yeah .. we use LVM on our OS disks and patterned it after our HP-UX ecosystems). Perhaps carving out another disk with say vgbak and regularly doing dd-copies of the OS partitions. Then in a fall back .. just boot off the other disk with possibly a routine to update grub... what do you think?

MondoRescue and others are kool but..

TIA!

Re: DRD Available for Linux? Rapid OS Fall Back Schemes?

Steven E. Protter — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 16:44:32 GMT

Shalom,

Best commercial tool I've used is http://www.acronis.com

It costs money, but can handle system images and restore them pretty quickly when called for.

SEP

Re: DRD Available for Linux? Rapid OS Fall Back Schemes?

dirk dierickx — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 07:54:12 GMT

if you have the disk space, copy/snapshot the vg/fs. otherwise, split off the mirror, it's an old tried & tested method which works anytime.
so, you don't have a mirror during patching, big deal!
protection against human error should be there in the form of regular (daily) backups.
linux is rather modular, and its packaging system is rather robust, i've had multiple updates gone wrong (power lost, disk issues, you know). i never had it result in a non bootable system (not saying it can't happen, though). ofcourse, the package commands did complain, and the issue had to be fixed before rpm or dpkg would work again.

Re: DRD Available for Linux? Rapid OS Fall Back Schemes?

Ivan Ferreira — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 13:15:02 GMT

If you are considering a new deployment probably you should think in virtualization.

For example:

VM snapshots - Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization virtual machine snapshots allow administrators to apply patches and upgrades in a transactional way, and roll back to a known good snapshot if the patch runs into an issue.

Re: DRD Available for Linux? Rapid OS Fall Back Schemes?

Alzhy — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 15:00:23 GMT

Ivan,

Our gold standard is vMare for Linux Virtualization. I've test drove and pitched KVM (aka RHEV) but no dice.

Our Large Linux Environments -- gerater than 4 socket/16-way systems will not be virtualized and are standalone systems - and this is really what I am architecting for - how to have a Quick OS Fallback Solution.

MondoRescue works great but not as fast as a fimple fall back ala DRDroot on HP-UX.

I am currently experimenting with having a backup vg00 on a separate disk with its own /boot that will be updated regulary (simple dd's plus fixes to grub and fstab)...

Re: DRD Available for Linux? Rapid OS Fall Back Schemes?

Alzhy — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 15:02:38 GMT

Dirk.. would you mind sharing your recipe/suggestion sir?

Our standard OS config is LVM2 on HW RAID protcted disk. I've got another similarly sized disk.

TIA...

Re: DRD Available for Linux? Rapid OS Fall Back Schemes?

dirk dierickx — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 08:00:02 GMT

take a look at the following guide from howtoforge. now a word of warning, howtoforge is not always reliable, but it does give you a good idea on what or how to do things.

this one deals with taking lvm snapshots and restoring them.

http://www.howtoforge.com/linux_lvm_snapshots