Ceph pool and usb drive backups problem

[ruppmeister]

I have a 4 node cluster currently running ceph for storage. Each node is presenting discs to the ceph pool and all is great with the 20 something VM's currently running.

Now I want to focus on getting rotating backups done. For this, I would like to have a couple of USB external harddrives that are rotated off site on a schedule. The plan is to plug a USB drive in for a week while backups run against the USB drive, then rotate it with a new USB drive for the following week.

I currently have usbmount installed to automount the USB drive to /media/usb0 on node #1. I then mapped a directory for VZDump to the /media/usb0 path and created a backup schedule for my VM's. Now the problem is the USB drive is only mapped on node #1. When nodes #2, #3, and #4 attempt to perform backups, like node #1, they perform backups to /media/usb0. Unfortunately, they don't have the USB drive mapped to this location so they begin to write to the local storage and not the external USB drive. I only caught this error once the local drives were almost full and started to become a huge problem.

How to I set this up the correct way so that all 4 nodes can write to the external USB drive as the backup location?

 

[dcsapak]

well where to should the nodes backup to ?

only the node where the vm is can do a backup of it, so the backup storage has to be there
what you could do, is have an usb drive per host, or have one host expose a directory over the network (e.g. with nfs)

or you could use a vzdump hook script, which moves the backups over the network to the correct node after the backup is finished

 

[ruppmeister]

Thanks dcsapak! Not sure why it didn't occur to me to mount as NFS to begin with. I used node #1 as the NFS server and then from GUI added NFS Storage for the remaining nodes to use for backups. This method in conjunction with node #1 having USBmount installed seems to work for us. Much appreciated!