On 4/07/2016 22:01, Smith, Graham - Computing Technical Officer wrote:
I don't use xenserver but my generic advice as a strategy would be to
backup the contents of the VMs rather than the raw virtual disks.
Effetively treating the guests as if they were physical systems. The
raw virtual disk files will be large but also non-unique so will cost
a lot more
in storage space in your backups and potentially take a lot more time
to backup. Backing up the files contained within the VMs should save
space
with BackupPC in taking full advantage of single instance storage of
repeated files in your pool common to many users or host systems.
Invariably it is the data rather than an operating system that is
usually most important to keep, so you may choose to only keep a
subset within each VM
of the unique data and configs etc. However it may be no harm to
include a single backup of a "template" of your base operating system
of the VM to which
you may subsequently restore data files to, particularly if your guest
OS are heavily customised and rebuilds are complex or time consuming
to recreate from scratch.
That may aid a quicker recovery situation and gives you a hypervisor
and potentially OS agnostic recovery option route should you need it
compared
to say taking VM system state snapshots and backing those up for example.
FYI, I use backuppc to backup the content of my VM's as above, except I
make use of my storage backend to assist (I use Xen instead of
XenServer, so some of this may not apply to your environment).
I use the pre-backup script from backuppc to connect to my SAN and run a
script which:
1) Takes a LVM snapshot of the VM (disk) to be backed up
2) Uses kpartx to scan for partitions
3) Uses mount to mount each partition on the SAN server at a VM specific
mountpoint
Then, backuppc will backup the VM specific mountpoint of the SAN
Finally, I use the post-backup script from backuppc to connect to my SAN
and run a cleanup script which reverses the above.
So far, this is working well for me.
PS, I also do remote off-site image backups, but I only have two copies
of the remote images, yesterday and current, where one of those can be
incomplete.
IMHO, you should do both file level backups of the contents, in case a
user accidentally deletes a file, or some crypto-locker virus, as well
as image level backups in case of crypto locker, malicious damage, or
serious system crash/disaster.
Emphasis placed on crypto locker solutions, been bitten and saved more
than once thanks to backups.
*From:*Elias Pereira [mailto:empbi...@gmail.com]
*Sent:* 04 July 2016 02:30
*To:* General list for user discussion questions and support
<backuppc-users@lists.sourceforge.net>
*Subject:* [BackupPC-users] Backup of virtual machines
Hello guys,
What the best way to backup VMs from xenserver?
Thanks in advance!
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