Re: [Xen-users] Backing up "live" Xen systems?

[Dan Cox <dan@xxxxxxx>]

If you can consider the data in the kernel buffer as an acceptable loss 
you can implement LVM backed guests and simply use the LVM snapshot 
feature. Then you are free to backup the snapshot. I'm running guests 
with iSCSI root and have configured my iSCSI target server to take LVM 
snapshots of all the guests every 10 minutes, keeping a few around just 
incase something goes seriously wrong at some point in the day. The 
backup server then  logs into the iSCSI target snapshots and backs up 
the guest. In this scenario, the guest and even the dom0 it lives on 
isn't involved at all in the backup process.
Dan-

Tim Freeman wrote:

> On Wed, 4 Jan 2006 17:50:30 +0000
> Steve Kemp <steve@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>  
>
> > On Wed, Jan 04, 2006 at 09:39:52AM -0800, Ram wrote:
> >
> >    
> >
> > > > I think that will be the thing to try working with next.  I
> > > > assume that pausing the image then doing a local rsync will
> > > > be reasonably quick.  But I will need to test it.
> > > >        
> > > Thinking a bit more, you might be better off doing the following:
> > > - Pause the virtual system
> > > - backup from the physical system
> > > - restart the virtual system
> > >      
> >  Thats pretty much how I took your suggestion :)
> >
> >    
> >
> > > Also, if you are already backing up your physical, extending it to do
> > > this above might be less work.
> > >      
> >  Yes, indeed.
> >
> >  The physical host will be backed up - so adding the "copied" virtual
> > images is the obvious thing to do.  I can't backup the live systems
> > directly is the problem.
> >    
> Because the kernel buffers might not be flushed to disk, you may either want to
> save/restore (instead of pause/unpause, and include RAM as part of backup) or
> sync the disks from inside the VM before backing up.  
>
> Also, instead of straight rsync, check out rdiff-backup for incremental backups
> based on rsync, I really like this program:
> http://www.nongnu.org/rdiff-backup/
>
> Tim 
>
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>  

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