Re: [Burp-users] Burp and File Locking (Thank you!)

[Graham K. <ke...@sp...>]

On Thu, Apr 21, 2011 at 09:25:42AM +0200, Matthias Babisch wrote:
> > Nice. Do you think you can you give me an indication of how many machines you
> > will be running it on in total?
> Sure. Since I can't know how many the setup can handle i might stop
> activating the whole thing and might be content with part of our setup .
> So i might roll it out to a part only (the important part).
> We are a medium sized software company and in the part of the company am
> working with has about 140 people. The sum of workstations and laptops
> should be about 140 thus. At the moment we do have about 130 Linux-based
> server virtual machines (most testing) and about 160 Windows-based
> server virtual machines (most testing also). Lastly we have about 20
> Servers in Hardware. I would expect to roll out burp to productive linux
> servers first which would mean about 50 machines. Its all about
> selective backup so i would not expect to have more than about 1 TB of
> data for the for this increment. If I really get to this point i will
> monitor things for a while before doing more.
> As you might expect it is an additional backup for now. It will have to
> run smoothly for a while before I consider removing other mechanisms.
> But the other mechanisms are making the backups to tape and I hope I can
> change that in part to disk-backup in the future.

Wow, this is very interesting.

I have to tell you that the largest burp installation that I have heard about
so far has only about 10 clients. And that is about the level at which I use
it myself too.
So, it sounds like you could be taking it to a new level of magnitude.

I agree that it is a good idea that you are starting off small to see how it
goes.

I think one thing that you need to be careful of is that you do not run out
of inodes on your storage file systems. Since I believe that you have already
mentioned that you are spreading it across a few storages, you are probably
ok. But I think it is worth doing some rough calculations before hand, because
you cannot adjust the number of file system inodes without reformatting the
file system (at least, on an ext2/3/4 file system).
If you are using the hardlinked_archive option, burp will use an inode for each
file saved (though quite a few less if hardlinked_archive is off).

The rough calculation should be something like this:
(clients per storage) x (files per client) x (backups to keep) x
			(some extra safety margin of your choosing)