Installation questions and complexities

[Bob Nelson]

Path issues when using --host command

I've moved this subject here from private email so the conversation might be more useful to more people - I'd be surprised if I'm the only guy that's run into this and it is worth documenting.

Long and short of it: I've got 10 physical VMWare servers running vSphere under v5.5. Each server has 2 hard drives. 192.168.10.6 is the master, so-to-speak and is where I've installed XSIBackup Pro. I'll insert the remainder of the email conversation now, to bring the subject current before asking my question...

The script I'm running:
./xsibackup --backup-point
=/vmfs/volumes/1e84018b-f336ddda/Backups --backup-how=warm --backup-type=all --date-dir=
yes --host=192.168.10.17

The result I get:
Copying file xsibackup to remote server 192.168.10.17
scp: /vmfs/volumes/datastore1/xsi-dir: No such file or directory
chmod: /vmfs/volumes/datastore1/xsi-dir/xsibackup: No such file or directory

the problem is that something is looking for a location that doesn't exist. On the master machine, the path to xsi is:
/vmfs/volumes/54aa8481-43a9ccc2-9a4a-003048bfaa50/xsi-dir

on the remote server, the path would be different - in this case, the drive is named:
/vmfs/volumes/5600bac4-3a876d6e-be97-0023aefedc70 and has a directory xsi-dir under that path. (Friendly name of the drive is V4D1D21TBRAID)

For fun, I tried to rename the V4D1D21TBRAID drive to datastore1, but that name is already taken on another server (192.168.10.16)

The response from support was:

Never use physical paths to refer to locations, at least when using XSIBackup, thus we’ll talk about /vmfs/volumes/datastore1, and not /vmfs/volumes/1e835618b-f377ddda (or whatever) (For clarity, the "datastore1" reference isn't fixed in stone - it refers to whatever your drive is named, not the physical path generated by eSXI)

XSIBackup distributes itself to surrounding (logically surrounding, they could in fact be on the other side of the world) servers were you want to place backups (only for IP backups). Therefore, it needs to know where to install itself, by default it uses the default installation path: /vmfs/volumes/datastore1/xsi-dir. This is configured at the beginning of the script in the xsidefaultpath variable. Just set it accordingly to what you need. (For clarity, this would mean editing "xsibackup" with a text editor)

We always recommend to use the default path and not to modify the default ESXi installation. If you do, you are automatically assuming you will have to deal with the derived needed teaks.

On to the question from where I am now:

If I change the xsidefaultpath to reflect each of the drives to install to when the script is run (for each machine) will XSIBackup know where the installation is located when I execute the script later with the --host location? Or would I need to specify the installation location via the --host command? For example, --host=192.168.10.17/vmfs/volumes/D1D21TBRAID/xsi-dir ?

Making progress... LOL

Thanks in advance.

[33HOPS]

Thank you for sharing.

When you want to deploy to a number of servers, you need to pre-stablish a deployment plan backboned by some sort of uniformity. I'll explain my self: the xsidefaultpath should be shared by all subsidiary servers, so that XSIBackup replicates itself to the same path.

We'll think about switching that fixed variable into an argument, so that you could set it by backup job, instead of being a fixed XSIBackup envirnoment variable. Nevertheless, forcing to have a fixed set of rules is not a bad thing. There exists a tradeof between flexibility and uniformity; allowing to tweak everything could end up being counterproductive.

[Bob Nelson]

Hi Daniel.

I wouldn't be opposed to having that uniformity. That said, the naming convention for the drives allows us to see what we have at a glance and how the drives are configured. Further, in vSphere, you can't replicate drive names across multiple servers - each, apparently, must be unique.

If I only need to deal with the drama for the initial install, I can live with that. My single concern is what happens when I run the script to do a backup and the default path is different per server. I'll be testing that tonight... The other option may be to point to the NFS share that's accessible to all servers.

Thanks for your help and input.

[33HOPS]

That is the idea, using a resource that is visible to all servers.
In any case, remember that we kept XSIBackup a script in sake of flexibility, so you can use something like:

xsidefaultpath: /vmfs/volumes/HD1-$(hostname -f 2>/dev/null)

To have an automatic custom path per server.
If you move the xsidefaultpath down in the header of the script, we have done that already on our part, you can use the previously assigned vars, like:

xsidefaultpath: /vmfs/volumes/HD1-$HOSTNAME

or

xsidefaultpath: /vmfs/volumes/HD1-$IP

[Bob Nelson]

That's excellent and solves the problem for me.

[33HOPS]

Please contact us through our forum at https://33hops.com/forum/

(c)XSIBackup: VMWare ESXi Backup