Wednesday, July 4, 2012

EvolveBDR v0.0.2 - a Bacula OVF

EvolveBDR v0.0.2 is a portable OVF format Virtual Machine pre-configured to run Bacula as easily as possible.  EvolveBDR aims to supply sane default configurations to allow SysAdmins to rapidly deploy EvolveBDR in their environments while greatly minimizing the learning curve necessary to successfully implement Bacula as a file level backup solution.

I spend a large portion of my time on the internet haunting /r/SysAdmin on Reddit.  A common question on that venerable forum often contains something similar to "Can you please recommend a low cost/FOSS enterprise backup solution?"  I and many others are quick to recommend Bacula, BackupPC, Areca, Cobian Backup, and Veeam's free edition.  Personally, I find myself recommending Bacula more often than not; a proven solution that has been in development for the better part of a decade; if not longer.

The power of Bacula comes with a small price: a learning curve that is often difficult for the novice *NIX administrator; especially for the Jr. Admin who finds themselves in a primarily Windows-based environment.  (This is not a judgement against their skill-sets or a denigration of their worth as a SysAdmin.)  The creation of EvolveBDR is a response to this challenge with a OVF format Virtual Machine which comes pre-configured to use Bacula as a file based backup solution using hard disks as the primary archival medium.

Some features you may find interesting:
  • The virtual appliance has been built on top of TurnKey Core v12.0 RC.
  • The file system lives on top of LVM for rapid provisioning of more disk space without rebooting the VM.
  • CurlFtpFs to make remote backups easier.
  • A default volume pool and Windows-friendly FileSets (one at the moment for Win2k3; Win2008 on the way) to help Windows SysAdmins spend less time configuring Bacula and more time implementing EvolveBDR/Bacula in their environment.
It should be noted that EvolveBDR is still being developed and tested.  If you insist on using this in production, you do so at your own risk.  It is also recommended that you change all of the currently configured passwords to something a little more secure than 'bacula'.  ;)

2 comments:

  1. Would be interesting to see Almir (bacula web interface) included in the image - http://almir.readthedocs.org/en/latest/index.html

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    1. I haven't worked on the project in a bit due to other responsibilities, but I will consider adding this. The web interface is clean sexy, and I like it better than the WebMin module. Plus, even the stripped down WebMin setup seems a little too noisy for my tastes.

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