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On Monday 02 August 2010 09:47:26 Peter den Hartog wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I would like to create backups of running VM's, is this possible? I found
> the backup, restore and update function in xsconsole but i can't backup
> whole VM's.
> I would like to do nightly back-ups of running VM's on a diffrent server
> and i was working on a script for this, but i wonder if this is even
> possible!
>
> Thanks,
> Peter
>
Peter,
to have reliable (!) backups of our Xen guest, we do the following:
- have their disks created on LVM volumes.
- at night, we do a "xm save guest backupfile"
- then we take an LVM snapshot of the LVM volume on which the Xen disk resides.
- then we restore the Xen guest again with "xen restore ..."
- next we copy the backupfile (this is the running state of the guest) and do a "dd" of the LVM snapshot to an image file. In case you use an image file, you need to mount the snapshot volume and copy the image file of it.
that's it. It does stop your machines, but only for a short amount of time (depending of the size of your guests RAM and the speed of your disks), but if you do this one guest at the time it should not be a big problem.
You could consider suspending the guests and do an LVM copy next, but this is the same thing like abruptly powering down a server or PC and then copy the disks: you're not really sure of the end result is a bootable server.
Hope this helps,
Rgds,
B. | 
