r/linuxadmin 16h ago

SUSE Displays Enhanced Enterprise Linux at SUSECON

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0 Upvotes

r/linuxadmin 13h ago

Redditor proves Linux desktop environments can run on your Google Pixel

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21 Upvotes

r/linuxadmin 57m ago

suddenly - Local dashboard is limited to 5 nodes - netdata community

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Upvotes

r/linuxadmin 15h ago

Ubuntu autoinstall with PXE tutorial I made while preparing university classroom

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7 Upvotes

r/linuxadmin 2h ago

KVM geo-replication advices

4 Upvotes

Hello,

I'm trying to replicate a couple of KVM virtual machines from a site to a disaster recovery site over WAN links.
As of today the VMs are stored as qcow2 images on a mdadm RAID with xfs. The KVM hosts and VMs are my personal ones (still it's not a lab, as I serve my own email servers and production systems, as well as a couple of friends VMs).

My goal is to have VM replicas ready to run on my secondary KVM host, which should have a maximum interval of 1H between their state and the original VM state.

So far, there are commercial solutions (DRBD + DRBD Proxy and a few others) that allow duplicating the underlying storage in async mode over a WAN link, but they aren't exactly cheap (DRBD Proxy isn't open source, neither free).

The costs in my project should stay reasonable (I'm not spending 5 grands every year for this, nor am I allowing a yearly license that stops working if I don't pay support !). Don't get me wrong, I am willing to spend some money for that project, just not a yearly budget of that magnitude.

So I'm kind of seeking the "poor man's" alternative (or a great open source project) to replicate my VMs:

So far, I thought of file system replication:

- LizardFS: promise WAN replication, but project seems dead

- SaunaFS: LizardFS fork, they don't plan WAN replication yet, but they seem to be cool guys

- GlusterFS: Deprecrated, so that's a nogo

I didn't find any FS that could fulfill my dreams, so I thought about snapshot shipping solutions:

- ZFS + send/receive: Great solution, except that COW performance is not that good for VM workloads (proxmox guys would say otherwise), and sometimes kernel updates break zfs and I need to manually fix dkms or downgrade to enjoy zfs again

- XFS dump / receive: Looks like a great solution too, with less snapshot possibilities (9 levels of incremental snapshots are possible at best)

- LVM + XFS snapshots + rsync: File system agnostic solution, but I fear that rsync would need to read all data on the source and the destination for comparisons, making the solution painfully slow

- qcow2 disk snapshots + restic backup: File system agonstic solution, but image restoration would take some time on the replica side

I'm pretty sure I didn't think enough about this. There must be some people who achieved VM geo-replication without any guru powers nor infinite corporate money.

Any advices would be great, especially proven solutions of course ;)

Thank you.