Hello,
On 14.09.2005 17:23, Brad Pinkston wrote:
Bacula Gurus,
wait before you read our suggestions :-)
1) I have been put in a position where backups have been setup
before me with Bacula. I am backing up approximately 30 servers and no
workstations. All servers are running Debian. What would the
recommended setup be as far as DB to use and any performance tuning I
should try. I know Bacula can do better than our current 170 KB/sec.
My previous Veritas solution at my old job was doing 170 MB/sec. I will
give details about my setup, but I wanted to get the opinions about
everyone’s opinion on an ideal setup first. I hope I’m not opening
Pandora’s Box with that one.
First thing to evaluate is if the mentioned 170 KB/s are the actual
overall throughput or the throughput from single jobs when other jobs
run concurrently.
I see quite a few possible bottlenecks concerning bacula:
- CPU or memory limitations, of course
- disk / tape attachment
- network connection
- and catalog database speed.
Without more details of your setup it's not possible to give good advice
what to do to improve performance, of course.
One suggestion, though: First, make sure jobs run sequentially, one at a
time. Activate spooling. The resulting reports will give you at least a
hint if the catalog is a serious limitation for you. When despooling the
attributes takes very long, you should consider improving the catalog speed.
One of the simplest solutions - although not with limited hardware /
budget - is to move the catalog database to another host, optimized for
database use. You might even set up a second network between the
database host and the backup server.
And, of course, you can try to fine-tune your database, although
discussing this as well as the relative advantages of MySQL vs.
PostgreSQL _can_ open pandoras box :-)
The given throughput seems _very_ slow indeed - with my rather antique
setup I can usually get much higer rates, even when running multiple
concurrent jobs, and usually find the overall throughput is either
limited by the client side (during differential / incremental backups)
or, when data is written to tape, by the drive's writing speed. Or, when
I have to change a tape and bacula waits for hours because I'm not at
the office :-)
2) We are looking at adding a warm site to out infrastructure. The
backup system I would like to have is:
30 servers at site A backed up to disk with one week retention
10 servers at site B backed up to disk with one week retention
Up till here, you've only got to decide if you want to set up one or two
directors (assuming, of course, that connectivity is ok between both sites).
Backup servers at site A and B to contain copy of backup from both sites
(i.e. after nightly backup mirror A to B and B to A)
Well, copying the volume files is a simple and robust solution, although
you won't be able to access them from the "other" sites bacula easily,
as they will not be in the right locations and / or the catalog.
After site A contains site B backups have it mirror all to tape backup
at site C with 3 week retention.
You can, of course, store bacula volumes from disk to tape, but that is
not a feature of bacula at the moment (Migration is the term used in
many other backup setups).
So, if you would want to recover from a backup on tape, you'd first have
to restore the right files to baculas volume store, and only then you
can use it as normal. So, one more step during recovery.
That need not be critical, but in many cases it prevents a fast and
simple disaster recovery.
How would I implement this with Bacula,
To give you good advice, I at least would need to know more about your
setup and your needs. You give an outline yourself, so I guess you know
a little about the limitations and possibilities with bacula already,
but the fine-tuning can only be done with more details.
and what would be my restore
process if I had to restore from tape?
See above.
Thanks,
I hope this helps, and of course you could provide us with more
information about your requirements.
Arno
Brad Pinkston
--
IT-Service Lehmann [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Arno Lehmann http://www.its-lehmann.de
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