xen discuss - Jul 2009 - Backing up xVM guests

Hello,

I am just starting to experiment with xVM Server after playing with VMWare for a
little while.  I am working in a small shop that is considering virtualizing
just a handful of older machines including a couple Windows servers.

Is there a good way to backup the guest VMs in xVM?  

Is there the ability from the dom0 to tell guests that they being backed up,
such as telling the VSS Writer on a Windows guest to quiesce the system state or
to use NTBackup to save the system state first?

Is there a way to back up guest VMs so that they can have complete disaster
recovery and also a file level restore for the "Oops, I deleted a
file" situations?

Thanks.
---H
-- 
This message posted from opensolaris.org

Hillel wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I am just starting to experiment with xVM Server after playing with VMWare
for a little while.  I am working in a small shop that is considering
virtualizing just a handful of older machines including a couple Windows
servers.
xVM Server, or the xVM hypervisor on OpenSolaris? i.e. are you
using a bui, or xm/virsh

> Is there a good way to backup the guest VMs in xVM?  
are you using zvols?  if so you can snapshot then and zfs send..
if vdisks, you can vdiskadm snapshot them and copy...

> Is there the ability from the dom0 to tell guests that they being 
 > backed up, such as telling the VSS Writer on a Windows guest to
 > quiesce the system state or to use NTBackup to save the system state
first?

Not currently.


> Is there a way to back up guest VMs so that they can have complete 
 > disaster recovery and also a file level restore for the "Oops, I
 > deleted a file" situations?

You can snapshot disks, restore snapshots, etc...
(man zfs, man vdiskadm)

For file level, that is more of a guest side operation.



MRJ

On Jul 17, 2009, at 10:40 AM, Mark Johnson wrote:
>
> You can snapshot disks, restore snapshots, etc...
> (man zfs, man vdiskadm)
>
> For file level, that is more of a guest side operation.
I think you should be able to turn on Shadow Copies in the Windows  
side to allow for file-level restores.