We acquired a cluster of NetApp filers a few months ago with only an iSCSI license (no NFS or CIFS access), intending to use it for data volumes on our Linux and Windows hosts and later for virtualization. We have one production Gentoo system mounting a data volume from the filer using open-iscsi, and we have several other Gentoo and Ubuntu systems that we would like to configure that way as well.
We also have an Ubuntu system connected to a tape library. We would like to take snapshots of the data-volumes that need to be backed up, mount those snapshots on the backup host, and do an incremental backup from the mounted filesystem.
Probably we would partition each LUN with one Linux partition, and put an ext3 or reiserfs filesystem with a cluster-unique label on that partition. Then we could take a set of snapshots for the backup, map all the snapshot LUNs to the backup-host, do iSCSI discovery on the backup-host, mount each partition (listed in a configuration-file) with a "mount LABEL=..." command, perform the backup, unmount the partition, do an iSCSI logout, and delete all the snapshots.
Has anyone gotten a setup like this to work?
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David Lee Lambert
Software Developer, Precision Motor Transport Group, LLC
517-349-3011 x223 (work) ... 586-873-8813 (cell)