GroupWise Disaster Recovery backs up your domain and post offices so you can restore items and users. There is also a disaster recovery mode that allows you to use the GroupWise Disaster Recovery server as a POA if a primary POA goes down. Because there are many minor things that might cause the primary system to go down (like nightly maintenance mode), GWDR is designed so that it won’t go into disaster recovery mode unless you enable it.
GWDR can backup multiple domains and post offices and run them in disaster recovery mode. It might run like a herd of turtles through a field of peanut butter but it will run, depending on the resources available. If you wish to run multiple post offices at the same time, you will need to bind an IP address for each to use.
How you implement your GroupWise Disaster Recovery system also depends on what your GroupWise is hosted on. If hosted on SLES Linux then you can use the Collector model, if Windows then you must use the Server Only model.
GroupWise Disaster Recovery is a backup system and recovery system. It is built around the idea that two is one and one is none, in other words. if you have two copies of your data then if something happens you still have one copy available.
GroupWise Disaster Recovery can be configured save a backup of your production system, send a copy to an off-site server and to a cloud host to maximize data safety.
Each GWDR server can support up to 20 profiles.
On the GroupWise Disaster Recovery server you need to create a profile for each domain and post office. It is highly recommended to allocate and bind a separate IP address for each domain and post office to be hosted by the GWDR server.
On the GroupWise server you need to set up a restore area.
You should expect to allocate 150% of the space your current GroupWise Post Office is taking up on the GroupWise Disaster Recovery server to accommodate 14 days worth of backups. We have found by experience that data grows by about 11% per day.
The databases and other files are copied to the GroupWise Disaster Recovery server into ~/<profile>/backup/weeknow/<day>
The BLOB (Binary Large OBject) files are copied to the GroupWise Disaster Recovery server into ~/<profile>/blobs
Disk space must be carefully considered for each GroupWise Disaster Recovery Server. When the GroupWise Disaster Recovery server reaches the error threshold for disk space, it will no longer create backups. Make sure the target system has plenty of space to accommodate the needs of your GroupWise Disaster Recovery backups.
GroupWise Disaster Recovery backs up GroupWise post offices and domains according to profiles that the administrator specifies, which tells GroupWise Disaster Recovery what to backup, where it is located, and where to store the data. The Profile can also keep track of disk space and when to expire the backups it creates. After the initial backup, each successive backup takes an average of 12% the full size of the live post office, also saving network and disk resources.
Disk speed directly impacts GroupWise Disaster Recovery performance. A disk that is tuned for fast writes to disk is highly recommended and will improve performance. When considering disk space requirements, also take into account future growth of GroupWise post offices, and the space that will be required to sustain that growth.
If GroupWise Disaster Recovery runs out of hard disk space, backups will no longer be created. A GroupWise Disaster Recovery profile has a threshold of days to keep in hot backups. This can help prevent systems from running out of disk space.
The disk space may reside on the GroupWise Disaster Recovery server or on a SAN. The requirements of the disk solution are as follows:
The disk solution should always be mounted for use with GroupWise Disaster Recovery.
The disk solution should be formatted with a Linux based file system, specifically a file system that supports symbolic links.
The rule of thumb is 2.5 times the post office size per profile, for the recommended 14 days of backups, plus the OS.
The GroupWise Disaster Recovery server requires the following disk space per profile:
Initial backup: 100% of the size of the post office.
Then 14 days of backups (on average) will be retained: 150% of the size of the post office, about 11% per day per post office.
Remember to take Post Office growth and the host Operating system into account while calculating disk space needs.
For example: A 100 gigabyte post office, for example, would require approximately 250 GB of disk space to retain 14 days worth of backups.
GroupWise Disaster Recovery can connect to GroupWise using either a Collector or a Server only model. If your GroupWise agents are on Windows, you can only use the Server only model. GroupWise agents on Linux can use either the Collector or the Server only model. For more information about these two connection, see the sections below:
The Collector model is built for speed. Backups that take too long to create are not very useful. The collector will copy the files locally before sending them to the GWDR server, so provide adequate space on the GroupWise Server.
The collector agent is installed on the GroupWise server, uses DBCopy to make a local copy of the post office databases, then sends the databases, BLOBs and other files to one or more GroupWise Disaster Recovery servers with rsync. This is fast and has minimal impact on the server.
Using the Collector model requires disk space on your GroupWise server. To calculate the disk space required for the Collector, do the following:
Calculate the size of the Post Office OFUSER, OFMSG, and GWDMS directories and add them together.
IMPORTANT:Do not include the OFUSER/INDEX directory in this calculation.
Multiple the size determined in the previous step by 2. This will tell you the amount of space you need to run the collector model on the server.
So for example, if the OFUSER directory contents was 1.5 GB and the OFMSG directory was 2.5 GB and the GWDMS directory was 1 GB the total space needed to service the Collector would be 1.5+2.5+1 = 5 X 2 = 10 GB needed somewhere on the GroupWise server to sustain the GroupWise Disaster Recovery Collector.
This backup method in with the GroupWise Disaster Recovery Server gets a client connection via a Linux mount point to the post office or domain to be backed up. GroupWise Disaster Recovery would then copy data from the live server to the GroupWise Disaster Recovery server via the mount point it had established to the live server housing GroupWise. It uses DBCopy to copy the data.
In this scenario, the GroupWise Disaster Recovery Server should be in close network proximity to the GroupWise servers that are being backed up with GroupWise Disaster Recovery. If a GroupWise Disaster Recovery Server and some GroupWise post offices are on a Gigabit switch, it would be best to have a network card in the GroupWise Disaster Recovery server that supports a Gigabit speed. This is slow and requires a lock on the database for the duration of the transfer.