Configuration environments

BSR is designed as a versatile block-replication engine that can be deployed across a wide range of IT infrastructures without environmental constraints. It delivers a consistent replication model regardless of the underlying compute architecture—physical servers, virtualized environments, or hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI)—and can be flexibly integrated into various operational scenarios.

Since BSR operates at the block device layer, independent of operating system or hardware architecture, it can be reliably deployed in the following environments:

Physical Servers

• Supports general x86 servers as well as diverse storage backends such as DAS, SAN, and NVMe

• Provides stable replication performance for high-throughput, enterprise-grade workloads

• Suitable for OS-level replication, database servers, and mission-critical applications

Virtualized Environments (VMs)

BSR performs block-level replication inside virtual machines across major hypervisors.

• Fully operable in VMware, Hyper-V, KVM, and other virtualization platforms

• Supports replication of virtual disks (VMDK, VHDX, QCOW2, and others)

• Enables P2V (physical→virtual), V2P (virtual→physical), and V2V (virtual→virtual) transition scenarios

• Well-suited for implementing HA/DR strategies for VM-based services

Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI)

BSR functions as an independent replication layer even in environments where storage and compute are tightly integrated.

• Compatible with platforms such as Nutanix, vSAN, and Red Hat HCI

• Operates reliably on distributed, local-storage–based clusters

• Integrates cleanly without conflicting with storage policies or cluster-management frameworks

Development / Test / Large-Scale Service Environments

BSR can be adopted in environments ranging from single-server deployments to large, multi-host clusters.

• Simple data-protection scenarios between individual hosts

• Enterprise systems running tens to hundreds of terabytes

• Distributed service architectures requiring continuous data availability

• Mixed-OS and multi-platform service environments

Specifications

The following are the physical requirements of the platforms and target systems supported by the BSR.

Platforms

Supports Windows 2012 or higher, Linux CentOS 6.4, Ubuntu 16.04 LTS or higher x64 environment.

File systems

In recent years, the size of replication volumes has grown significantly (tens to hundreds of terabytes), and as a result, the initial synchronization of these volumes now requires a substantial amount of time. When performing initial synchronization over the entire volume, the process may take several days to even several weeks. For example, with a 1 Gbps network link, synchronizing a 10 TB volume requires at least 27 hours, while a 100 TB volume can take more than ten days.

To address this long initial-sync problem, we implemented FastSync(Filesystem Active Sector Transfer Sync), which synchronizes only the sectors actually allocated by the filesystem. FastSync dramatically reduces the initial synchronization time by transferring only the filesystem-used areas instead of the entire volume. For instance, if a 100 TB volume contains only 10 GB of actual data, FastSync can complete the initial sync in under one minute over a 1 Gbps network.

FastSync supports the following filesystems. For all other filesystems, synchronization is performed over the full volume:

• NTFS on Windows

• Ext3, Ext4, XFS, Btrfs on Linux

CPU

It is recommended to configure at least 2GHz, 4 core or higher, x64 compatible processor. There is no problem in operating in a processor environment with a lower specification, but considering the I / O performance of the system, it is necessary to secure the specification of the configuration machine as high as possible.

Memory

• The system typically starts paging virtual memory when memory usage exceeds 70%, depending on kernel settings. Because paging degrades system I/O performance, it is beneficial for replication to be configured to always have at least 30% free physical memory so that paging is suppressed.

• The memory used by BSR is primarily required for buffering purposes and is determined by the maximum write request value (max-req-write-count) in the BSR settings and the size of the transmit buffer. Below is an example for a Windows environment.

  • For synchronous without a send buffer

    • At the default setting for write requests (10k), use a maximum of 1.5GB per resource.

    • At the write request maximum setting (100,000), use a maximum of 3 GB per resource.

  • For asynchronous with a 1GB send buffer setting, use a maximum of 3GB per resource in the

    • Use a maximum of 2.5 GB per 1 resource at the write request default setting.

    • Use a maximum of 4 GB per resource at the Write Request Max setting.

For a server with 64 GB of physical memory, approximately 20 GB (30%) of memory free space is required, and of the memory space used, a maximum of 2.5 GB per 1 resource is required for asynchronous by default.

• If you don't have that 30% free memory, you'll have to accept a degradation in basic I/O performance due to paging.

• The 3 to 4 GB NP memory usage per resource required by replication should be kept free, otherwise you will run out of memory, which can lead to failure.

Transmit buffer size

The size of the transmit (TX) buffer on the local side is ideally set to a number that allows for the free transfer of locally generated I/O data to the remote side. It is found by the following equation

• Maximum size of transmit band per time (s) * Transmit timeout time (s)

For example, for a 1 Gbps band, you can get (about 100 MB/s * 5 s) = 500 MB, and you can set a buffer of 500 MB to 1 GB.

If you need to consider the variable bandwidth of the WAN segment, you can add more capacity to the above size plus the time (s) to tolerate the WAN bottleneck delay, or buffer it with a proxy (DRX). Typically, WAN leg buffering is specified at 5 to 10 times the TX buffer.

Disk

Basic installation space

It requires about 200MB to install all the binary execution modules of bsr, and 1GB is required to store the log of bsr, which requires about 2GB of disk installation space.

Mirror disks

Theoretically, the capacity of a BSR's mirror disk is unlimited, but the actual disk capacity is limited to 10 TB. At higher capacity, the meta-area corresponding to the mirror disk capacity grows along with it, and the operation (Attach) that needs to process the entire meta-disk becomes time-consuming and impedes operations.

Meta Disk

Depending on the capacity of the replication volume, you need to estimate the capacity of the metadisk. It requires about 33MB of meta disk space per 1TB of the replication volume, and for more accurate size, see Metadata Size Estimation.

Network

throughput

In a recent corporate environment, mirroring on a local network is generally configured with a bandwidth of 1 Gbps to 10 Gbps, and a remote replication environment (Disaster Recovery) for DR (Disaster Recovery) is generally operated with a lower bandwidth. That is, it is applied to a wide range of network environments from very low bandwidth (10 ~ 100Mbps) to high bandwidth. However, because replication in a low-band network environment is bound to affect replication performance due to bandwidth limitations, consider such as linking replication accelerators for performance improvement.

ports

The mirroring ports for replication (specified in the configuration file) must be open. On Windows, additionally TCP loopback ports 5678, 5679 must be open for control.

Storage provisioning

It is only supported for the THICK provisioning method of storage provisioning. Thin provisioning environments with disk space reclamation are not compatible with BSR.