Best practices for backing up Solaris Zones?

[Adam Thompson]

We're using Bareos 15 to backup, among other things, a Sun SPARC server running multiple Solaris-10-branded zones under Solaris 11.3.

I see two ways to backup the entire server:

a) back up the entire output from "zfs send -D -R" ; this would give me, I think, a full backup of the entire server including global and non-global zones. The stream would still be deduplicated and compressed internally.

b) install a separate agent in each zone ; this would be far less efficient, but would be a heck of a lot easier to do incemental/differential backups if I ever need to, and a heck of a lot easier to restore individual files.

Is anyone else backing up Solaris zones? How are you doing it? What are the pros and cons?

Thanks,
-Adam Thompson
atho...@avant.ca

[Marco van Wieringen]

Yes I do like for always. There is a third altenative as zones are mounted under
some directory on the global zone e.g. normally /zones but have a look at your zonecfg.
I have one external server where I backup the complete filesystem including zones from
the global and on my own production server I backup per zone with zfs snapshots mounted
under an alternative root and using strip path.

We had this discussion a year ago or so.


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Marco van Wieringen marco.van...@bareos.com
Bareos GmbH & Co. KG Phone: +49-221-63069389
http://www.bareos.com

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P. Storz, M. v. Wieringen

[Adam N. Thompson]

Yes, I know this discussion arose a year ago... but I have found that I'm not actually getting full backups of each zone.

It seems that there are ZFS filesystems that I can't access directly from the global zone.  (Maybe I'm making a simply mistake on the Solaris side here?  Dunno...)

I re-posted this in the hopes of getting more than one data point, since we just re-evaluated the current status of our backup systems.

(And I'm quite happy with Bareos, BTW.  I still haven't been able to sell my boss on paying for open source, though.)

Adam Thompson Senior Systems Administrator voice: 204.789.9596 x24 | email: atho...@avant.ca | web: avant.ca

---

From: bareos...@googlegroups.com <bareos...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Marco van Wieringen <marco.van...@bareos.com>
Sent: August 30, 2016 12:09
To: bareos...@googlegroups.com
Subject: [bareos-users] Re: Best practices for backing up Solaris Zones?

 

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