Bacula-users

Re: [Bacula-users] Deploying Bacula

2010-02-03 11:51:47
Subject: Re: [Bacula-users] Deploying Bacula
From: Henrik Johansen <henrik AT myunix DOT dk>
To: bacula-users AT lists.sourceforge DOT net
Date: Wed, 03 Feb 2010 17:48:16 +0100
On 02/ 3/10 04:23 PM, FredNF wrote:
> Le Wed, 03 Feb 2010 13:18:37 +0100,
> Henrik Johansen<henrik AT myunix DOT dk>  a écrit :
>
>> The bulk of Bacula's DB operations are purely disk IOPS bound so I
>> would argue that IOPS is way more important than RAM.
>>
>>> With the others advices I had, I'm planning to have a dual Xeon
>>> Nehalem, with 8 ou 12 GB of RAM, and four 300 GB SAS disks in RAID
>>> 10. Not sure about the OS, I'm balancing between FreeBSD and Gentoo.
>>>
>>> But, if someone here have a similar setup, I'm ready to hear his
>>> advices and tips about my configuration.
>>
>> We are currently planning a large Bacula deployment (~1k machines) so
>> I have been facing many of the same challenges.
>>
>> Regardless of whatever database you choose you'll need enough disk
>> IOPS to service the DB and I don't think that 4 x 300 GB SAS are
>> sufficient.
>>
>> A 4 disk RAID10 will give you the write IOPS equivalent to 2 disks
>> and the DB is most likely going to do synchronous random writes which
>> in turn is 100% disk IOPS bound.
>>
>> Find the tech specs of the disks you are using - they should give you
>> an indication of how many random write IOPS they can handle.
>
> I will do some bonnie++ tests :)
>
>> Additionally, you should align your FS to the same blocksize as your
>> database - 8K for postgresql if I remember correctly. It you are
>> using a fixed blocksize FS where the blocksize is lower than the DB
>> blocksize you could end up in a siutation where one DB operation is
>> causing 2 or more disk IOPS.
>
> Right, we never see the problem on this side. The filestem used for the
> director can be:
>
>       - if FreeBSD FFS or ZFS (ZFS is nice supported with FreeBSD 8)
>       - if Gentoo or Linux Distro, ext4
>
> In the same way, what FS do you, on the list, prefer for storage ? We
> don't use tape, only disk storage. The first who talk of NTFS will need
> to avoid my curses for generations.edk

If ZFS on FreeBSD is as reliable as it is in Solaris then I would go 
with ZFS.

>>
>> We backup ~35TB each week in a 3 week rotation so we just have to
>> scale out in order to meet our demands and we are planning to go
>> multi-DIR, multi-SD with a couple of very hefty MySQL servers to
>> service them.
>>
>> Directors will run Linux and both our SD's and MySQL servers will run
>> Solaris.
>
> So, you plan to have dedicated databases servers, having a lightweigh
> director but huge database servers ?

Correct.

> And, if Solaris on the SD, you'll surely use ZFS ?

Yes. I don't trust any other FS with that amount of data.

>> The only place where we scale up instead of our are our SD's -
>> currently our 3 SD nodes have access to 300+ disks and 2 dedicated 10
>> Gbit fiber links.
>
> Wow.. Tht's really impressive. I'd like to have enough money for
> building such system. But, that's not and we'll use hand-made NAS with
> poor inexpensive SATA disk ;)

So are we - all done using off-the-shelf x86 hardware.

>>
>>> I'm freaking out about the configs files :) They'll be really huge I
>>> think.
>>
>> They don't have to - just split stuff into manageable pieces. We keep
>> one file per client which gets included into the bacula-dir
>> configuration.
>
> I was looking for includes. But, If I read well the documentation, I
> can't specify a directory for includes. I need to give the full path
> for each file ? Right ?

It can be as simple as including the following in your bacula-dir config :

@|"sh -c 'for f in /etc/bacula/clients/*.conf ; do echo @${f} ; done'"


>
>>
>> Use templating wherever you can.
>
> The developers are working on an automatization of writing
> configuration files just after a new install of a dedicated server :)
>
> Regards,
>
> Fred.
>
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