How to create CIFS replication in QoreStor

Hello, my name is Andre Cooley, and welcome to another video demonstration with Quest QoreStor. In this quick video, I'm going to be showing you how to create a replication scheme between two QoreStor instances using CIFS NFS containers. Replication can be created using various container types, such as CIFS NFS, as well as RDA/OST and VTL, however RDA and OST and VTL must be done from your backup server. The great part about replication with QoreStor is that the data is duplicated before being sent over the network. This saves loads on bandwidth, up to 20 to 1 reduction in storage, not only on the remote sites but locally as well. Not only that, but replication windows are 10 to 15 times smaller so the data is accessible at the remote site very quickly. So again, in this demonstration, we will be setting up a replication between two existing CIFS NFS containers. So as you can see, we run the QoreStor dashboard, but what I want to show you first is our source and target containers, so let's go look at the containers lists on our local QoreStor instance. So as you can see at the bottom of this page, we have a CIFS container called tt-CIFS-local. That is going to be our replication source. And if we go to our other instance, we can see our containers list. And at the bottom we have our tt-CIFS-remote. So with these two containers, we're going to create our replication. So let's go back to our local instance and click on the replications from the menu. Once in here, we're going to click on Add replication. Here we have our add replication menu, and we will use the option local as we're going to tell this local site to replicate to a remote site. So with local selected, we then click on the drop down menu to select the container, which will be our tt-CIFS-local source, and we'll click Next. Next we could choose to set encryption. We strongly recommend setting up encryption on your application schemes, but for this demonstration, we'll just click none. Next, we will need to add our target container. So here we will select Remote and enter our credentials for our remote instance. These are the same credentials that you would use to log into the QoreStor instance. We'll then put an IP of our target instance and then click Retrieve containers. This takes just a few seconds, and once done, the list becomes available. Click on the dropdown once more and select the remote container we are replicating to and click Next. We come to our next field, which then asks if we want to set a bandwidth limit on our replication between these two containers. This could be set to 0 to allow for an unlimited limit on bandwidth, but setting a limit may be necessary in some environments to have limited network resources or multiple replications and backups happening, in which case, those might require priority. So this is really just a situational option. We'll leave it at 0 here. Then we're going to click Next, and it will bring us to our confirmation menu where we can look over the settings. Once all is verified, we can click Finish and we'll create the replication almost instantly. As you can see now, we have replication configured, And if there is data already residing within this local CIFS container then it will begin to replicate immediately. There is also a scheduling option that you can use to schedule the replications between the containers. This is a way to manage when the replications run, but also to indirectly manage bandwidth. For example, if you have most of your backups running between the hours of 6 PM to 3 AM, then you can have a replication running the whole time outside of those hours. Also you could schedule it to only run on specific days. If no schedule is set, then replication will run when available and as new data is introduced to the containers. I hope you've enjoyed this quick demonstration on configuring CIFS replication with Quest QoreStor. To learn more about Quest QoreStor, please visit us at Quest.com/products/QoreStor, or visit our entire portfolio at Quest.com.