EBS snapshot backups from a FreeBSD zfs file system: zpool freeze?

[Freddie Cash]

On Mon, Jul 8, 2013 at 2:01 PM, Jeremy Chadwick <jdc at koitsu.org> wrote:

> On Tue, Jul 09, 2013 at 08:06:25AM +1200, Berend de Boer wrote:
> > >>>>> "Markus" == Markus Gebert <markus.gebert at hostpoint.ch> writes:
> >     Markus> What you really need in that case is the ability to
> >     Markus> snapshot all EBS disks as group.
> >
> > Which Linux offers.
>
> And now I shall quote your original mail that started this thread:
>
> > I'm experimenting with building a FreeBSD NFS server on Amazon AWS
> > EC2. I've created a zpool with 5 disks in a raidz2 configuration.
> >
> > How can I make a consistent backup of this using EBS?
>
> Therefore, the answer/solution for you at this stage seems to be: use
> Linux.  Linux does what you need -- it offers you guest-level utilities
> that interface with the proprietary storage system back-end (EBS) that
> is offered by your choice of hosting vendor (Amazon).  So what's the
> problem with using Linux?  Why sound so apathetic-yet-confrontational
> (re: "Linux offers this, FreeBSD doesn't")?
>

Something else to consider is that this may not be a FreeBSD issue at all,
but a filesystem/storage system issue.  Meaning, if you use ZFS on Linux
... EBS backups will not work.  Same if you try to use Solaris or Illumos
or any other ZFS-enabled OS that will run in Amazon's cloud.

At which point, it would make more sense taking the discussion upstream to
Illumos to find a way to quiesce a ZFS pool in such a way that EBS backups
would work.  Once that is done, then it can filter downstream to FreeBSD,
Linux, and others.

-- 
Freddie Cash
fjwcash at gmail.com