Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Dedicated Server : Fastest way to recover from a crash?

[Rightguy]

Hi all

We currently have 5 dedicated server as only one of them are on windows the rest are all on Centos 5.3 with cpanel

What we need now is a way to easily restore these servers in case something goes wrong so we can quickly reset them up on another server put it back online in matter of hours

I was thinking about virtualizing these server with openVZ or anything better so i can move quickly to another server in no time. My colleague is saying that virtuaization wont be enough because we have shoutcast streaming on our servers and it require a lot of power (but i don't think it would affect anything on that)...

Anyway I'm open to all suggestions

Thank you!

[GCM]

Backing up is key. You may want to try something like R1Soft for backups and RSync for keeping up-to-date copies between multiple servers.

[simkiss]

What do you mean about SHOUTcast servers requiring a lot of power? And how would power consumption related to backing up?

I recommend using RAID to avoid problems when there are crashes and backing up just incase the RAID controller goes bad on you...

[lemeneid]

Best way would be to use Rsync and point your DNS records to multiple servers so that you have redundancy when any of them go down.

[jphilipson]

Use R1soft backups. You can barebone's restore to the same server or a new server in a failure.

[MikeDVB]

I agree - R1Soft is probably your best option - other than that, I can't think of anything off the top of my head.

[JSCL]

Hey,

I too like R1Soft, but you might want to get a second drive and RAID-1

[Rightguy]

Originally Posted by simkiss

What do you mean about SHOUTcast servers requiring a lot of power? And how would power consumption related to backing up?

I recommend using RAID to avoid problems when there are crashes and backing up just incase the RAID controller goes bad on you...

It's because SHOUTcast require an excellent network... sorry if i misled you with "power" as i was talking about the network "power" instead.

So maybe if it's in a virtual environment maybe it'll cause trouble.. but this I'm not sure and that's was a part of my question.

By virtualizing the servers i would be able to backup the server images elsewhere so i could just set up another server and put the images back on it and bring it back online in no time but again would it be a good solution or not? And why

Thank you

[Rightguy]

Originally Posted by jphilipson

Use R1soft backups. You can barebone's restore to the same server or a new server in a failure.

Ok but does the free tool does the job? look like it only do for linux but not for windows am i right?

And i'm sure it have better tools like that and are free

[AquariusStorage]

Originally Posted by Rightguy

Ok but does the free tool does the job? look like it only do for linux but not for windows am i right?

And i'm sure it have better tools like that and are free

R1Soft has Linux and Windows compatible clients. See:

http://www.r1soft.com/windows-cdp/

http://www.r1soft.com/linux-cdp/

And something free that is just as good, well, simply put no there is nothing that is free that is nearly as good as R1Soft.

[Rightguy]

ok i contacted r1soft and all that look really great

but they didn't answer one of my question yet

How can i remotely restore a backup?

[Rightguy]

Now that i have all the information from r1soft it look like it wont do it for us

As GCM said Rsync would be the best option but I'm not familiar with this method... Is anyone have any good documentation on how to set it up?

Thank you

[Eleven2 Hosting]

I would highly recommend AGAINST r1soft if you are looking for the fastest way to recovery from a crash. Something like rsync will beat r1soft anyway by about 8x the speed.

[krosswindz]

Normally after installation and configuration of the new server, I just keep a bzip2 compressed root file system. If that particular server dies, I just replace the hardware and untar the file system. Reboot and then I restore the home directories or other things that I back up weekly.

[Rightguy]

And what are your tough about openVZ?

Is it reliable enough to do the job i want to do?

Thanks!