This aspect of using Percona Xtrabackup over Native Replication has been in my head for sometime now and I just cant seem to find an answer to this, I am posting this as a last resort seeking advice from you experts.
I went through the process of implementing the slave server using innobackupex and its working all good. But for what I can see this can only be used at the initial stage in bringing up the slave instance up to speed. After that native MySQL replication takes over from there on, thus bringing its drawbacks of exerting an extra amount of load on the master.
So is innobackupex just used for the initial snapshot and restoration of the slave? If this is the case what advantage would xtrabackup have over Native Mysql Replication?
Thanks in Advance
Replication is for availability,you might be interested in things like pacemaker clustering and the Percona mysql resource agent to manage replication and provide automatic failover.
Considering innobackupex, it is primary a backup utility, replication might go wrong, in that case you'll be happy to have a fast way of recovery.
Hope this helps.