ZFS has some magical features, comparable to NetApp’s WAFL capabilities. One of the less-used on is the ZFS send/receive, which can be utilised as an engine below something much like NetApp’s SnapMirror or SnapVault. The idea, if you are not familiar with NetApp’s products, is to take a snapshot of a dataset on the source,…
The goal – connecting multiple Oracle ASM snapshots (same source LUNs, of course) to the same machine. The next process will demonstrate how to do it. Problem: ASM disks use a disk label called ASMLib to maintain access even when the logical disk path might change (like adding a LUN with a lower ID and…
It has been a long while, I know. I was busy with life, work and everything around it. Not much worth mentioning. This, however, is something else. I have discovered an issue with Citrix XenServer 5.0 (probably the case with 5.5, but I have other issues with that release) using NetApp through NetApp API SR…
aking LVM snapshots as a mean of backing up MySQL is rather simple, as can be described here. However, if you are into security, you would strive to grant minimal permissions for the action to the MySQL user. Per MySQL Documentation, the required privileges is “RELOAD”. That should be enough, granted on *.*, of course.
When one wants to achieve fast provisioning of virtual machines, some solutions might come into account. The one I prefer uses Linux LVM snapshot capabilities to duplicate one working machine into few.
This can happen, of course, only if the host running VMware-Server is Linux.
LVM snapshots have one vast disadvantage
Modern Linux LVM offers great abilities to maintain snapshots of existing logical volumes. Unlike NetApp “Write Anywhere File Layout” (WAFL), Linux LVM uses “Copy-on-Write” (COW) to allow snapshots. The process, in general, can be described in this pdf document. I have issues several small tests, just to get real-life estimations of what is the actual…
