Ever growing mailboxes and archiving

[Vincent Fox]

On 4/20/2011 12:50 AM, Rudy Gevaert wrote:
>
> Hi Vincent,
>
> How do you make the snapshot consistent (netbackup+vmware snapshot)?
>
> Do you stop cyrus?
I'll have to ask our backup admin if you want technical specifics
and guarantees, but my understanding was that the process included
an atomic snapshot of the VM.  Then the backup is made of that.
We don't stop anything it's done hot.

As I said, we are not presently running Cyrus in a VM, our current
example of this is with a Sympa list-server.  Which has some similarities
to Cyrus only in having lots of small files for it's list archive disk.

Our Sympa box uses only 1 LUN=1 disk no LVM composed of multiple LUNs
it did occur to one of our guys what if you had a volume composed of
many small LUNs and the snapshot is not atomic across them all?
We opened a ticket with VMWare about it and have not heard back yet.

For a Disaster Recovery test we ran a backup of the Sympa node
and then restored the image into a test VM.  The entire process
including rummaging around for LUNs and fixing interfaces etc.
took us about 3.5 hours.  Restore speed 30+ megs/sec for
oh about 350gigs of data.