[Lustre-discuss] Lustre ZFS Snapshot

[Dilger, Andreas]

On 2014/06/29, 1:24 PM, "Indivar Nair" <indivar.nair at techterra.in<mailto:indivar.nair at techterra.in>> wrote:
Referring to https://jira.hpdd.intel.com/browse/LUDOC-161

The idea is to be able to backup and restore individual files / directories to another non-Lustre storage OR tape drive...

Well, the idea of LUDOC-161 is not to backup and restore individual files, but backup and restore of the whole MDT or OST.

So, can one mount the MDT and OST snapshots to form a parallel Lustre Volume (on the same cluster) and take a point-in-time backup / rsync of the complete Lustre filesystem?

In theory yes, but this isn't yet supported.  The problem is that the Lustre filesystem name is the same between the snapshots, so the snapshot filesystem cannot be mounted on the same clients as the original filesystem.

The device-level backup/zfs send/recv, especially of the MDT, is mostly intended for disaster recovery, though with ZFS it may also be practical to use it in the manner you are proposing.

If not, can one mount a copy of MDT and OST snapshots on another Lustre cluster to recreate the complete Lustre Volume?

It would be OK to mount it on separate clients.

If you want to do file-level restore it may be better to do file-level backup from the mounted filesystem.

Cheers, Andreas
--
Andreas Dilger
Lustre Software Architect
Intel High Performance Data Division