Thank you for flying Ebssense!

What is it?

Ebssense is an opensource command-line tool for managing high-performance EBS volume stripes and making backups of them using EBS snapshot sets.

Why would I use it?

LVM stripe across multiple EBS volumes is higher performance than a single volume.

LVM snapshots enable very small backup windows and the transfer of the backup happens via a background EBS snapshot.

EC2 tagging of volumes and snapshots makes for easy management via the AWS console and no lock-in to this tool.

Local SQlite caching of tagged metadata makes operations very quick and not 100% reliant on doing tag lookups.

Quickstart

Install from packages

Ubuntu 12.04 Package

wget https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/ebssense/ebssense_0.0.1-20.deb
dpkg -i ebssense_0.0.1-20.deb
apt-get -f install
ebssense build --help

Debian Package (coming soon)

Archlinux Package (coming soon)

Install from source

Install the pre-requirements from system packages:

• Ruby >= 1.9 with bundler >= 1.3
• lvm2
• xfsprogs
• libxml2
• libxslt

Build

git clone git://github.com/jeremyd/ebssense
cd ebssense
gem install bundler
bundle install --standalone

Now you can run the tool directly from the checkout location's bin dir:

ebssense --help

Usage

Ebssense has descriptions of each option when you specify --help on any of the sub-commands.

Setup the standard environment variables for AWS Credentials

export AWS_SECRET_KEY=XXX
export AWS_ACCESS_KEY=XXX

Creating a fresh volume-stripe from scratch.

ebssense build --help
Options:
            --name, -n <s>:   Unique name to be used for all operations regarding this data set.
         --num-vol, -u <i>:   Number of EBS volumes to stripe together with LVM.
        --size-vol, -s <i>:   Size of *each EBS volume in Gigabytes
     --mount-point, -m <s>:   Mount point where the LVM stripe will be mounted. (Default: /mnt/ebs)
 --device-letters, -d <s+>:   Choose the device name suffix(s) for all volumes in the stripe.  Use one letter per volume separated by spaces.  Example --device-letters l m n o p --num-vol 5
 --lvm-device-name, -l <s>:   LVM device name. (Default: lvol1)
--lvm-volume-group, -v <s>:   LVM volume group name. (Default: esense-vg-data)
          --region, -r <s>:   Amazon EC2 region. (Default: us-east-1)

Backing up the volume stripe.

ebssense backup --name <id>

Automatic expiration of old backups.

ebssense clean --name <id> --keep <backups to keep>

Listing metadata.

ebssense list

ebssense list --name <id>

Restoring the volume stripe from backup.

Optional: show all found tags in the account.

ebssense list --tags

Synchronize locally the metadata for the sets tagged with id.

ebssense list --sync <id> 

Restore.

ebssense restore --name <id>