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

[Per Andreas Buer <perbu@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Steve.

Steve Kemp wrote:
>   I've been testing Xen for a few weeks now and am just about to
>  put it into production use.  (I wrote some scripts to create 
>  Debian images easily; the tools are included in Debian Sid as
>  "xen-tools".)
>   
:-)

>   The only thing troubling me at the moment is backing up the
>  virtual instances.
>
>   I'm looking to run about four virtual systems upon a host.  If
>  the physical host dies then I'm going to be in trouble without
>  backups!
>
>   I realise I can setup traditional backups within the virtual
>  instances using rsync, scp, or a backup agent.  But I'm curious
>  about backing up images live.  (Primarily to avoid having to
>  setup near identical scripts upon each instance and make sure
>  they work correctly.)
>   
If you place your images on LVM you should be able to take a snapshot of 
the filesystem(s) and mount or dump this (you probably have to fsck the 
snapshot if you are to use dump). That should be rather painless.
>   It strikes me that the live-migration support does a lot of the
>  things that a backup of a live system should do - literally sending
>  the contents of the systems image + memory to a new host.
>   
Live migration does not migrate the filesystem image - so using it for 
backup purposes is rather hard. :-)
--
There are only 10 different kinds of people in the world, 
those who understand binary, and those who don't.

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