With WholesaleBackup you can start with a standalone server and then grow to failover or load-balanced servers at any time down the road. Our architecture allows our solution to easily grow as your business grows.
Standalone Server
By default, when you install WholesaleBackup Server, it is configured to run as a fully independent backup server. The software will configure automatic scheduled backups of all key metadata to a location you specify (we recommend you at specify an external USB disk or a network share to another computer). Recovering your backup server then is simply a matter of recovering the backup account data and the meta-data.
Failover Server
Assuming you are putting your backup account data on some device or computer accessible on your network (say for example a NAS or SAN or Windows Server) and your primary WholesaleBackup Server points to it, then you can install a second WholesaleBackup Server also pointing to the same data. You can then use the backup mechanism described in the previous section to replicate all metadata to this server. Failover can then be activated at any time by DNS changes or port forwarding depending on your network architecture. Further, we have a license management mechanism that can force your clients to connect to any IP you choose in case of an emergency (this helps mitigate DNS propagation time issues). This mechanism is controlled by our support team, so contact us directly if you need to forward backup traffic to a new IP in an emergency. Of course, the best failover plan is one that you test before an actual emergency.
Load Balancing Servers
Similar to the failover server configuration mentioned in the previous section, you can have multiple WholesaleBackup Servers installed and configured to not only point to same user account data, but also share the master account database (the default name is WSBU.db) so that all servers can be processing backups simultaneously. To do this, you will need to use a third party load-balancing device (‘pf’ is a robust and free load-balancer which runs on openbsd) or utilize Microsoft’s built in load balancing network feature, to forward all TCP traffic to different backup servers. In addition, be sure the file system you place the WSBU.db file on fully supports Microsoft’s file locking capabilities.
In failover or load balancing scenarios, it is essential that the file WSBU.db is resident on a file system which fully implements Microsoft's file system locks, such as NTFS. Most NAS devices use Linux SAMBA which does not adequately implement Microsoft's file system locks so do not place WSBU.db on such NAS devices to share among your WholesaleBackup Servers.More detailed information on configuring load balancing, including links to Microsoft articles, can be found here.