Re: Image Catalog over NFS

Patrick,

ok, I know it's late, but I have the answer today.

If you want to migrate to any cloud, to a new datacenter and can't move physical media, or when there's no compatibility between your backup media and there's not enough disk space for a backup to your local disk, VTL is the answer... or NFS.

I found documentation on IBM portal, and suddenly this page dissapear last week...

So I've created my own article in LinkedIN (this time in english) on how to use a Linux NFS system to backup my IBM i system.

Seems confusing on first setup, but once it's working it's easy. And can run the "dd" command from your Linux to avoid network traffic.

My option 21 on 1Gb network from my Power8 system (0.25 cores) to my tiny PC Linux box took 16 minutes (95 GB total ASP, 36% used) , then I used PIGZ on the Linux side to compress and send to IBM Cloud Object Storage (2 hours 16 min on my 10 Mbps test Internet connection). Compressed file on IBM COS : 9 GB.

I've also tested to restore from this ISO using NFS and works really well (easier than BRMS procedure with NFS).

If still interested here's the link:

https://bit.ly/3d01iY4


Regards

Diego E. KESSELMAN


El 20/12/20 a las 10:22, Patrik Schindler escribió:

Hello Diego,

Am 16.12.2020 um 16:25 schrieb Diego E. KESSELMAN <diegokesselman@xxxxxxxxx>:

Read this document:

Thanks a lot, this clarified things. The missing link for me was that the virtual device has to be created with a remote specification. The „intelligence“ is there within.

I wonder if one can save time and unnecessary network traffic by not writing a file full of zeros, but create a sparse file. Instead of

dd if=/dev/zero of=IMAGE01.ISO bs=1M count=10000

do a

dd if=/dev/zero of=IMAGE01.ISO bs=1M seek=10000 count=0

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparse_file for details.

I did not test if IBM i can cope with sparse files, but I don’t see any reason why it shouldn’t.

For me, I stick to the already established ftp workflow. The backup server uses jumbo frames, while the E4A isn’t configured for them. So, UDP (NFS) answer packets will be lost in transit and NFS doesn’t work. Mount and un mount work, though. I did not try if NFS can be forced over TCP in IBM i.

:wq! PoC