Author Topic: Zentyal availability / migration to VM  (Read 2093 times)

3dge14

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Zentyal availability / migration to VM
« on: February 15, 2013, 05:34:09 pm »
Hello,

I am currently running Zentyal server 2.0 looking for the best way to maintain availability in the event of hardware failure. Currently I am running 3 drives with mdadm RAID 5 with LVM on top for / & /home partitions.

I have made many tweaks over the years, and unfortunately some of them were done in a pinch and not documented properly. Is there any easy way to migrate these tweaks to a new install on a new system? If not, is it possible to migrate the server to a virtual instance (hosted on kvm,xen, or xenserver) on a new system using LVM snapshots or otherwise? I would like to have a virtual setup of Zentyal where I can take full snapshots while live that could be migrated to a new VM Host OS on a new system in a pinch (hardware failure) without major downtime and configuration.

I fully intend to upgrade to 2.2 after this is addressed. What do you think?

Thanks!

half_life

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Re: Zentyal availability / migration to VM
« Reply #1 on: February 16, 2013, 01:52:10 am »
I would suggest using a second machine as a test platform if possible.  The process is actually quite simple to go p2v on a linux machine for use with kvm.  I would reccomend the Proxmox solution which is both openvz and kvm on one platform. I have done this a few times with great success.

 shutdown and reboot the machine using a bootable live disk with clonezilla on it. Redo backup will also serve here. Have an external hard disk handy to capture the backup.  Use the backup tool of choice to take a complete backup.

  Go to the second machine and install Proxmox.

 Create a virtual machine (not a container) with enough drive space to house your original machine backup.  Depending on the number of lvm volumes you will have to create more drives (one per volume).

either boot the virtual machine with your choice of backup tool on cd or use an iso.  Restore the backup onto the new virtual machine.  Boot and test.

These are terse instructions meant to give you an idea not cover every little detail.

Virtualization is good but realize that you will have to push harder (hardware wise ) to get the same performance. Software RAID is a no no in these environments.  A good hardware RAID card is going to be important to you if you follow this route.  I also do not recommend putting your system partition on your RAID array.  I prefer the system disk all by itself so that an array rebuild doesn't leave me without a console to work with.