[disclaimer: FCP rather than FICON point of view assumed in the
following so there might be differences]
If your workload could live with an atomically consistent but "dirty"
disk content, you could use online block device snapshot technologies.
Maybe inside Linux with LVM snapshot. Storage servers can also do this
for you without Linux CPU cycles and even more so they can support
snapshot consistency groups which you need if some filesystem (or raw
RDBMS table space) spans multiple volumes (such as with LVM striping).
There might be backup software solutions exploiting above, but that's
beyond my knowledge.
On restarting your workload (such as Linux boot) after a restore of such
snapshot content, the workload will see some consistent atomic disk
content, but the content is not clean as in closed application files or
as in unmounted filesystems. So the application/filesystem (or whatever
read/writes from/to disks) needs to cope with that, e.g. by replaying a
journal.
I suppose if you not only collect disk snapshots but before doing so
suspend the Linux to disk (potentially with hypervisor support), you
could resume such Linux with those disk snapshots and apps/fs would not
even notice (because they slept and then wake up with the old state as
if nothing happened inbetween). Suspending is of course already some
kind of disruption or temporary outage taking some time as opposed to
what I mentioned above.
On 11/09/2016 06:42 PM, Scott Rohling wrote:
I should have added that we will do a physical backup of zLinux in some
cases without quiescing - but it is always supplemented with a logical
backup.. The physical restore will normally give you a working zLinux ...
any corrupted/missing/changed files can be restored via the logical backup
to bring things 'up to date'.
Scott Rohling
On Wed, Nov 9, 2016 at 9:39 AM, Scott Rohling <scott.rohl...@gmail.com>
wrote:
Yes - a logical backup solution -- TSM is an IBM solution.... you
need a backup client which can read your filesystems and send them to a
server for archiving/retrieval ....
A physical backup of the hard drives will always require a quiesced system
for a clean backup.
Scott Rohling
On Wed, Nov 9, 2016 at 9:15 AM, Neal Scheffler <vmwiz...@gmail.com> wrote:
To get a clean backup of our zLinux servers we currently shutdown the
zLinux server and do full volume backups of its disks.
Is there some other method / product available that we could use to get a
clean backup without having to take an outage on the zLinux server?
Thanks,
Neal
--
Mit freundlichen Grüßen / Kind regards
Steffen Maier
Linux on z Systems Development
IBM Deutschland Research & Development GmbH
Vorsitzende des Aufsichtsrats: Martina Koederitz
Geschaeftsfuehrung: Dirk Wittkopp
Sitz der Gesellschaft: Boeblingen
Registergericht: Amtsgericht Stuttgart, HRB 243294
----------------------------------------------------------------------
For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions,
send email to lists...@vm.marist.edu with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit
http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
----------------------------------------------------------------------
For more information on Linux on System z, visit
http://wiki.linuxvm.org/
