Re: [Xen-users] Backup domU

[Greg Woods <woods@xxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 2011-07-21 at 07:50 +0100, Simon Hobson wrote:
> Andy Smith wrote:
> 
> >It is worth considering running a backup scheme for virtual hosts
> >that is the same as for any other host, just for the win of being
> >able to generalise the process.
> 
> That's what I do - each guest does it's own backups using the same 
> script that all the non-virtualised machines use.

I'll have to think about this some. It appears there is no way to get a
completely clean image without a service outage; I was afraid of that,
but I wanted to be sure.

The trouble with backing up the guests the same way as the "real"
machines is that it removes one of the great advantages of
virtualization. Now I have to install and configure the backup software
100 times, once for each guest (yes I know there are ways of at least
partially automating this), instead of something that can be done maybe
half a dozen times on my host OS's. I may choose to just continue with
the snapshot backups, understanding that there is a slight possibility
that the file I need to recover might not be available on a given day's
backup and I might have to resort to an older copy. In my case, the
applications being run are mostly simpler things like DNS and SMTP
servers, rather than complex things like databases, so the risk that the
applications may be holding data in memory is much less.

--Greg



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