[OpenIndiana-discuss] OI WN!

[Josh L. Bernardini]

Hi all,

Just wanted to report a great result using OpenIndiana. I spun up a couple of old, pre-virtualization servers on OI to use as storage pools for vSphere Data Protection which comes included with VMware's vSphere Essentials Plus. But the Essentials Plus package doesn't offer great disaster recovery tools if you also want local high availability unless you spend more money. And VDP doesn't offer anything like replication or, frankly, useful backups as you pretty much can't move those backups off-site! Enter ZFS.

I decided to back my two VDP appliances with iscsi zvols, and then snap/send/receive the zvols offsite (so far seeded and tested locally.) VDP does have good dedup and has taken ~9TB down to less than 4TB. But replicating and recovering a VDP appliance is unsupported. Long story short: I took recycled hardware + open source OS + free backup software and appear to have built an enterprise class DR solution! More details and ongoing testing here: http://communities.vmware.com/thread/442619?tstart=0

Thanks to those of you who build and maintain OI!
jb