Xen project Mailing List

- Brian

On Mar 20, 2009, at 9:40 AM, Brian Krusic wrote:

Hi Nick,

I've experimented using LVMs and creating a snapshot volume of the root partition where my vms live (/var/lib/xen/images).

You can then do whatever want with what's on the snapshot volume. So for example. your virtual machine image is in a state in time when the snapshot was taken.

Keep in mind that when you create a snapshot of VMware instances, it pauses the VM before doing its thing.

When running popular cloning sw like Norton Ghost, etc... the machines state is also fixed in time so I think you won't really be able to get around the state-in-time/cloning thing.

- Brian

On Mar 20, 2009, at 8:35 AM, Nick Couchman wrote:

Cloning a VM while it is running isn't really a great idea. In order to maintain filesystem consistency, at the time of the clone all filesystem activity must be frozen and data needs to be flushed from the caches and buffers out to disk devices. If order to do this while the VM is running, you have to interact with the O/S of the VM to freeze filesystem transactions (XFS is the only filesystem I've used that supports this), flush out the buffers and caches ("sync"), then clone the disk image, then unfreeze the filesystem. A much easier option is to pause the domU temporarily ("xm pause <domU>"), clone it, then unpause.

Why is being able to clone while a domU is running so critical to you?

>>> On 3/20/2009 at 9:26 AM, freddie weng <freddieweng@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

Hi everybody,

I found that we can use virt-clone to clone a VM but only when that VM is not running.
This is not useful most of the time.
Can we clone a VM even when it is running?

It's critical to my research, any idea is much appreciated!!!!

all the best,
Freddie

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Re: [Xen-Users] How to clone a VM when it is running?