Hi,
Sorry to chime in so late.
Agreed with this.
But I''ve done a dump/restore on live and paused Xen domUs from my dom0
and haven''t experience and issues (yet).
I am constantly doing dev work on the dump/restored image by copying
it to my isolated box.
I also do an rsync from within that domU as well.
I had a weird/bad thing happen to me a while back on a non critical
domU server.
i was only doing dump/restores and i rebooted my dom0 that the domU
was on (yes, I manually shut down the domU) and when my dom0 came back
up, my domUs image file (img) showed as an ACB archive file. Dude, i
did the command; file name.img, and thats what came back.
My history of those dump/restored img files goes back as far as two
weeks and they all showed as ACB archive files so the fu@#up happened
before then and I didn''t notice.
My setup was Centos 5.3 dom0 and a fully virtualized Ubuntu 7 domU. I
set the disk to grow as needed.
Had I done rsyncs in addition to backing up the domU image, I would be
fine.
Anyways, i''m still manipulating the img file in hopes of getting data
from it.
Tyler has been EXTREMELY helpful on this but it doesn''t look to be a
simple task.
My advise is to use 2 diff backup methods;
1 - The img backup provides a fast and easy restore if needed.
2 - The rsync provides a more time consuming but non the less, a way
to mitigate a failed primary backup.
- Brian
On Jun 25, 2009, at 3:23 AM, John Haxby wrote:
> On 25/06/09 11:01, Gak wrote:
>> How do i create consistent snapshots of VM''s from Dom0?. What
are
>> the backup methods or snapshot/snaprestore methods that are
>> followed for Xen Virtual environments?.
>
> Shut down the VM, take the snapshot.
>
> Anything else requires serious cooperation from VM and, equally
> importantly, the applications running in it. Sometimes you can get
> away with suspending the guest and taking a snapshot of memory and
> disk at the same time -- that isn''t very useful though because to
> recover, say, an individual file from the back up you have to
> restart the suspended copy. Even worse, if there are any in-flight
> transactions between the VM and other machines (virtual or
> otherwise) those will restart -- having your bank balance debited
> twice would be very annoying.
>
> In the general case, you''re better off running your backup within
> the VM. In special cases you can do something different -- for
> example, you might have a database that can get itself into a
> consistent state so you can take a snapshot of its file system on a
> suitable NAS or SAN.
>
> jch
>
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