Regular Replication of Backup Server from Production Server
We have three Luminis servers: Production, Backup, and Development. Production is the daily-use server. Backup is meant to be nearly identical to Production and ready to be switched to temporary regular use in the event that Production were temporarily unavailable. At the worst, Backup should be replicated frequently enough that data would never be more than one week out of alignment with Production. Development is for developing and testing and would be replicated to Production standards once a month or quarter.
We thought we could use the replicator script to daily or weekly replicate the settings from Production to Backup. When we try this things look good at first. One problem that we noticed is that the script will not overwrite (update) existing user entries (or, maybe, any kind of entries): it only will add new entries. Is there something that we can do to modify the replicator script to all it to update existing entries, without creating duplicates? Alternately is there a better way to do what we want to do, without needing to completely rebuild the Backup server to perform a fresh replication each day or week?
replication
I find it easier to work with operating system level or other 3rd party tools to replicate servers.
What operating system are you using?
Are the servers connected to a SAN? If so what filesystem?
In the past we would use veritas file system on our HP-UX EVA (san) and had mirrors of the servers running in parallel. Each night, the system was put in hotbackup mode, the mirror broken, a new mirror created, and then the system put out of hotbackup mode. And then during the night, that old mirror image was backed up to tape.
Although we could have just as easily used that mirror to make a new test server.
Or if you are using Solaris and zfs/ufs, there are numerous options taking snapshots and sending them to other machines.
Server Setup
Jason,
Thanks for your comments. We are on Windows 2003 servers. We want to have two fully operational setups responding to distinct DNS': one server as the production machine and one as a test/backup machine. Our users do not log directly into Luminis, but to an ASP app that authenticates against Active Directory and then passes them through to Luminis. We use the ASP application because it allows us to insert login interupts to prompt users to set up or fill out various information as the College needs it. A corollary to using it is that we can, by changing one configuration parameter, point it at any Luminis instance. That way, if our production server were to go down, our users would log in to their accustomed location and simply be pointed to the backup server.
Because of this failover aspect, we would like to keep the production and backup machines independent, but as synchronized as possible. Of course, we coulld just be very careful to do everything that we do on one box to the other. We all know how well that's going to work in the long run. We'd prefer to have something automated. That's where we were headed with the idea of using the replication script to synchronize the backup with production. However, that doesn't appear to update existing entries, for users at least, but only add new entries.
replication
I haven't dealt with windows systems in a long while, but I suspect that you would need to get a product like http://www.steeleye.com/products/windows/datarep.php to handle replication.
Or, go with a virtualization solution like VMWARE, and take a nightly snapshot of the system and copy it to your backup system.
Backup and mirroring -- need help
Jason, we are getting ready to go live wih Luminis IY soon but we are not quite satisfied with the "bare metal" recovery scenario Sungard is offering. I found your way much more realible in terms of quick recovery and will really appreciate any help. We are on Sun Solaris SPARC 10 and right now we have Production and Test servers. Ideally we would like to have some kind of a mirror server we can update nightly , so we can use it in case of Poduction failure. Again, I like the idea but hove no idea what to start with . Do you use replication as well ?
Thank you
Elena Vevea