When I get started on stuff like this, I like to try and get it finished, so unsurprisingly I spent some time yesterday evening looking at how I would recreate my CrashPlan VM, currently running CentOS in VirtualBox, using iohyve and bhyve.
Having failed to migrate a ViirtualBox VM running ubuntu I wasn’t expecting it to be any different with CentOS, so didn’t even bother with this step. Probably a good idea, as getting a CentOS VM up and running from a .ISO file proved difficult and after trying version 7 and 6.9 eventually parked that for another day. There’s no reason why this has to be running CentOS, other than I quite like using it, but to be honest once it’s setup and running I very rarely even look at the VM.
Having successfully got a ubuntu server VM up and running which I blogged about here, I thought I’d start at this point again and creating another was a breeze. I also decided to take a snapshot of it so in future if I need another ubuntu VM I should just be able to clone this one. Unlike the VM I created for Openoffice, having a GUI is pretty useful for both setting up CrashPlan, checking backup progress and fixing any issues, so the first job was to add a GUI to the VM. I also need to be able to control it remotely, and with a GUI that’s not going to be possible through a basic terminal session so will need a VNC server. I found this blog, which helped a lot, although it’s not exactly how I got everything set up.
Once I had a working GUI that I could access remotely, the next step (after another snapshot to hopefully save time in the future) was CrashPlan. This was pretty straightforward, although the most nerve-racking stage of the process given I have over 4TB of data backed up and didn’t want to lose any of it or have to start the backup again from scratch. Code42 have some pretty good support documentation, which explains how to migrate things to a new computer. My configuration is slightly different as I’m not backing up files stored on the VM, but files mounted via NFS shares on my FreeNAS box, so this was the first step.
I needed to run apt-get install nfs-common and then configure the /etc/fstab file, so all the same mount points were created in ubuntu. More by luck than good management (I read the guide after created the ubuntu VM) I’d used the same username, and just to be on the safe side, I set the hostname to be the same (crashplan.centos) even though it’s running on ubuntu. Pretty sure I didn’t need to do this, but it can’t hurt.
Once all that was configured, it was then just a case of adopting the old backup on the new computer. I had some network issues with this which I don’t understand as this morning everything worked fine! The CrashPlan app couldn’t connect to the service, so I couldn’t select the backup to adopt, but this morning that worked fine and the folders I was expecting to see appeared and it started syncronising the files. Everything worked fine until it began the incremental backup where the CrashPlan app crashed.
I was expecting this, as I’d only allocated 2GB RAM to the VM and knew that I’d had to assign over 4GB on the CentOS VM to get the backup to run. Checking the Code42 website, it suggests 600MB for every TB of data backed up, so I thought I’d try with 4GB to begin. That also reminded me that I’d need to set the Java memory allocated to CrashPlan, which is done by running the command java mx 4096, restart.
It’s been running now for several hours and still has a few hundred GB to backup so will probably be running for many hours, if not days later. It all looks fine though, so that’s my two main VMs migrated to bhyve. I have a Windows VM that I occasionally use for demonstrating a Java Glassfish App, although it’s been a while since I needed it. I also like to test newer versions of FreeNAS in a VM, so I’ll probably look to set that one up next. Other than those, I can probably leave VirtualBox behind and look to update to a later version of FreeNAS. Pretty sure FreeBSD 10.3 becomes end of life (EOL) in April 2018, so I’ll start to encounter some problems updating jails. I’m hoping FreeNAS 11.2 has been released by then and I can make one big leap rather than several smaller ones. I’ll let you know when I do…
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