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Advanced Desktop User | Administration | Community Contributed Virtual Appliance | Production

ElasticDrive - Virtual Backup & Remote Data Protection Platform

ElasticDrive allows you to mount a remote storage resource such as Amazon's S3 for continuous data protection

Description

Enomaly Inc is proud to announce the availability of the ElasticDrive virtual storage system for VMware. http://www.elasticdrive.com/vmware.html

ElasticDrive is a Distributed Remote Storage Application that allows you to access your data regardless of location with the assurance your data is safe. It makes it possible for a remote storage resource, such as Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3), to behave like a local hard drive, creating a cost effective and safe method to mirror information to several places in real-time. ElasticDrive provides a virtual block device (virtual hard drive), which can be used to build local file systems, virtual raid arrays and virtual tape backups which can stored to a traditional storage device. Visit www.ElasticDrive.com for a Free Download!

=== KEY FEATURES ===

Connect to Any Web Based Storage System
Connect one or more web based storage systems including Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3), Nirvanix or even our very own storage area network

Long-Term Data Retention (Time Traveller) - Coming Soon
Elastic Time System (ETS) is a platform for data compliance that enables versioning and auditability requirements. It provides a time-shifting interface that permits a real-time and continuous view of data in the past by simply mounting a drive with a specific date.

Backup Local Data to a Remote File System
In addition to local site physical and virtual server protection, ElasticDrive Geo-Targeted Remote Storage extends data protection to remote sites using secure & powerful data replication.

Customizable & Expandable Network Hard drive
Leverage cost-effective local & remote disks to augment daily tape backup.

Continuous Data Protection (CDP)
If a local site experiences failure or downtime, it can recover its data from a remote site. Once the facilities at the local site are fixed, the remote replicated data can be written back to the local site to resume operations.

=== USE CASES ===

* ElasticDrive CDP is a service that captures changes to data to a separate storage location. There are multiple methods for capturing the continuous changes involving different technologies that serve different needs. ElasticDrive CDP-based solutions can provide fine granularities of restorable objects ranging from crash-consistent images to logical objects such as files, mail boxes, messages, and database files and logs.

* ElasticDrive supports high speed block-level replication which enables the movement of transactional workloads such as mail servers and database servers. With block-level transfer, only the portion of a file that has changed is replicated making it ideal for incrementally synchronizing large database servers and enabling efficient offsite data transfers.

* Perform anywhere-to-anywhere workload migrations with broad multiplatform support. Move and protect all workloads regardless of hardware, operating system or virtual host.

* Protect all workloads in the data center with live incremental replication. Implement flexible, efficient and affordable workload protection and recovery solutions.

* Virtual Tape Backups (VTL) ElasticDrive can be configured to act as VTLs or disk-based arrays that are configured to look like tape libraries to enable offsite backup.

* Instant Recovery of Data. If a local site experiences failure or downtime, it can recover its data from a emote site. Once the facilities at the local site are fixed, the data can be written back to the local site o resume operations.

------

VMWARE PLAYER OR SERVER

- download virtual appliance from following link: http://www.elasticdrive.com/vmware.html
- unpack it to your Virtual Machines directory.

VMWARE PLAYER OR SERVER

- download virtual appliance from following link: http://www.elasticdrive.com/vmware.html
- unpack it to your Virtual Machines directory.
- File > Open > Browse > path to your dir > filename.vmx

== Quick Start ==
** sudo for root

1. once in terminal session, use following credentials
username khaz, password khaz (change this)
2. to run
- edit /etc/elasticdrive.ini
- sudo elasticdrive /etc/elasticdrive.ini -d
- sudo mount -o loop /fuse2/ed0 /s3
3. to stop
- sudo fusermount -u /fuse2/ed0
- sudo kill -s SIGTERM processid

VMWARE APPLIANCE CONFIGURATION
- change root passwd, delete user khaz
- setup environment up to your taste, if you want

CONFIGURING APPLICATION
- edit /etc/elasticdrive.ini
- add credentials in [drives] section (after 's3://S3ACCESSKEY:S3SECRETKEY')
- create bucket name (maybe instance id + number)
- specify disk size by setting '&blocks=' (default setting of 65536 blocks gives you 268Mb)

RUNNING APPLICATION

- /etc/init.d/elasticdrive_khaz start
- application should automatically startup on reboot

USING YOUR NEW FILESYSTEM

Now you can use your filesystem, that is persistent to Amazon Simple Storage (S3).
Try copy some files to /data/s3, or 'umount /fuse2/ed0' (if you have lots of data, this would require more

time, well, up to 30 minutes), 'ls -al /data/s3' should show nothing when unmounted, reboot, 'ls -al /data/s3'.

EVACUATION OF DATA FROM VMWARE APPLIANCE

This basically covers unmounting your current filesystem and transferring it's state to external persistence source. Initially I tested creation of 24Gb, placing different size files and unmounting. First umount took about 20 minutes or so, all subsequent worked in a less than minute.

=== Configuring ElasticDrive (elasticdrive.ini) ===

The ElasticDrive configuration file (elasticdrive.ini) is a standard python
file. No XML here! Your configuration file looks like this:

#elasticdrive.ini
[global]
configured=1
fusermount="/usr/bin/fusermount"
pidfile="/var/run/elasticdrive.pid"

[logging]
filename='/var/log/elasticdrive.log'
level=logging.DEBUG

[servers]
modules=""

[engines]
modules=""

[drives]
fuseblock|/path/to/fuse/fuse="file:///tmp/foo.img?size=2000000000"
fuseblock|/path/to/fuse/fuse2="s3://S3ACCESSKEY:S3SECRETKEY@aws.amazon.com/
?bucket=YOURBUCKET&stripesize=65536&blocksize=4096&blocks=6553600&
sizebyblocks=1&maxthreads=5&ttl=40"

Most of the configuration should be left as is. Just modify the stripesize,
bucket, XXXYOURAWSKEYXXX and XXXYOURAWSSECRETKEYXXX in the
S3 configuration URL.

If you are creating a RAID Stripe, the blocksize and blocks should match
the size of your physical hard drive. If you are using a smaller than
1TB hard disk, you can format the url instead like this:
&size=BYTESINDEVICE
Remove the sizebyblocks, blocks, and blocksize variables if you do this.

Once you have configured your installation, make sure to comment this line:
#raise Exception('Elasticdrive has not been configured.')

Once you're done modifying your configuration file, be sure to backup the file
to a remote location.

NOTE: You need to create the mount folders manually. In the above example, you
would need to...
mkdir -p /path/to/fuse/fuse
mkdir -p /path/to/fuse/fuse2

=== Starting/Stopping ElasticDrive===

To run ElasticDrive, simply enter:
> elasticdrive /path/to/config/file.cfg [-d]
The -d option will daemonize ElasticDrive for use as a system daemon.

To shut down ElasticDrive, send it a single SIGTERM (or control-c from
the console). ElasticDrive will flush all commands to disk and exit safely.
ElasticDrive will also correctly close all kernel connections.
Do not send multiple kills or ElasticDrive may lose data.

=== ElasticDrive USE CASES ===

--- Direct Network Storage for S3 ---
To use ElasticDrive directly as a storage device, simply run the ElasticDrive
binary from /opt/elasticdrive-x.x.x, then create a filesystem on it and use it
like a normal filesystem. After unmounting, the drive can be remounted on any
system that can see S3.

> elasticdrive /etc/elasticdrive.ini -d
> mke2fs -b 4096 /path/to/fuse/ed0
> mkdir /s3
> mount /path/to/fuse/ed0 /s3 -o loop

--- Virtual Backup Tape ---
You can also copy an existing filesystem directly to ElasticDrive:

> elasticdrive /etc/elasticdrive.ini -d
> dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/path/to/fuse/ed0 bs=4096 count=sizeofyourdrive

Note that this method of backing up preserves all the little things about your
filesystem (like atime, mtime, hardlinks) which get missed by webdav or
minimal FUSE based storage.

--- Software RAID (Preferred) ---
Software RAID is our favourite way to use ElasticDrive. By mounting a virtual
RAID device, you can have pervasive remote storage which keeps a remote hot
copy of your data, while using the local drive for high speed read/write
access. The RAID mirror will catch up in the background with your filesystem
changes. In the event of an unexpected failure, you have one side of a RAID
mirror ready to recover with! This works especially well with EC2 instances ;)

> elasticdrive /etc/elasticdrive.ini -d
> losetup /dev/loop1 /path/to/fuse/ed0
> mdadm --create /dev/md0 -n2 --level 1 /dev/sda2 --write-mostly /dev/loop1
> mke2fs -b 4096 /dev/md0
> mkdir /s3
> mount /dev/md0 /s3

In the event of a failure, on the rebooted machine (or a different machine):
> elasticdrive /etc/elasticdrive.ini -d
> losetup /dev/loop1 /path/to/fuse/ed0
> mdadm -A /dev/md0 /dev/sda2 /dev/loop1

Note that the ElasticDrive configuration file on the recovering machine must
be the same as the configuration file on the failed machine. Be sure to
back up your configuration file in advance to a remote location.

--- Software RAID (File Backed Storage) ---
One interesting side effect of having file backed raid devices is that you can
back them on your existing filesystem. This is not as efficient as writing
directly to the disk, but it also means you do not give up your partitions
(think EC2). Create a
'fuseblock:/home/youruser/elasticdrive0/ed0':'file:///?size=yoursize'
entry in the drives configuration, then try this recipe:

> elasticdrive /etc/elasticdrive.ini -d
> losetup /dev/loop1 /path/to/s3/fuse/ed0
> losetup /dev/loop2 /home/youruser/elasticdrive0/ed0
> mdadm --create /dev/md0 -n2 --level 1 /dev/loop2 --write-mostly /dev/loop1
> mke2fs -b 4096 /dev/md0
> mkdir /s3
> mount /dev/md0 /s3

Note that you could also make a ram backed drive the same way, although that
would only be useful for high read access, low write usage, like a small
database file, for example.

--- S3 Options ---

Please follow the example of the S3 configuration. The resource path is the
bucket name for the drive to be stored in.

size - The size of the block device in bytes.
stripesize - The size, in bytes, of the file chunks which will be written
back to S3. Larger files will lower per transaction fees, at
the expense of more total bandwidth. Acceptable values are
4096, 8192, 16384, 32768, or 65536.
blocksize - The block size that the kernel will see. 4096 is a good default.
sizebyblocks - Size the drive by the number of blocks x the blocksize.
Required when the drive is larger than 2GB or so.
blocks - The number of blocks in the filesystem when using sizebyblocks.
bucket - The bucket inside which to save the block objects. This will be
created if it does not already exist.
maxthreads - A soft limit on the number of read/write threads which will
access S3 at the same time.
ttl - Amount of time cache entries will be stored in the cache.
user - Your S3 access key.
passwd - Your S3 secret key.

=== Support ===

ElasticDrive includes free upgrades for one year from the point of purchase.

For support options and pricing, please contact us at
+1-212-203-4734 (U.S.) or +1-416-710-5831 (Canada). Support is available for installation setup, configuration, consulting, and application integration (includes setup of shared file systems and file level optimization).

=== License ===

The free version of ElasticDrive is limited to 40GB per installation. A license is required for each OS installation (virtual or physical). Full license details are available at www.elasticdrive.com.

If you require greater storage capacity, please visit http://www.elasticdrive.com.

We offer enhanced versions with 250GB, 500GB, or 1TB storage, and an infinite version with unlimited storage and installations.

Last updated: 02/05/2008

Operating system: Debian

Applications installed:
ElasticDrive Virtual Block Device

VMware Tools installed: No

Size: 250MB MB
Torrent available: Yes
(What is BitTorrent?)

Primary account
Username: khaz
Password: khaz

Memory allocated: 256MB MB

License: Proprietary

Submitted by: enomaly

Download link provided by the submitter, not VMware. Report broken downloads here.

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