On Fri, Nov 04, 2011 at 08:51:08AM -0400, Mo Morsi wrote:
> On 11/04/2011 08:36 AM, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> >How large is the snap metadata, ie. the stuff that you copy between
> >the machines? How large would it be given, say, a typical
> >database-backed webserver installation where you might have lots of
> >static contents and some database tables?
>
> One of the nice things that I added to Snap was the ability to
> ignore static content managed by the package management system. For
> example when taking a snapshot of the filesystem, only the files
> modified post installation and the files not tracked by the package
> system will be backed up and restored.
>
> It should be simple enough to expand upon this concept, adding
> additional hooks to call out to to determine what exactly should be
> backed up and restore (hooks to be invoked during the backup /
> restoration process is already a feature on the project todo list /
> backlog).
>
> >Is the metadata in an ad-hoc format and how hard would it be to turn
> >it into a standard format (probably one that we would standardize
> >ourselves)? Can it be useful in other contexts -- eg. could a system
> >administrator look at the output in order to get a definitive list of
> >the changes made to the machine? Could it be useful for auditing?
> >Could the format be diffed?
> >
>
> Right now the snapshot is a simple tarball containing the actual
> contents of the snapshot and the metadata in XML files. So for
> example there is a packages.xml file which contains the packages
> which have been recorded, services.xml containing the services and
> associated metadata, etc. We can use this as the basis of the
> standard, easily encapsulating any required information there.
Can you give us some numbers -- how big was the tarball for the
migration you did?
If we had a more formal description, then it could be the basis for a
useful collection of tools.
snap
puppet manifest
snap formal
--------> spec for --------> sysadmin
libguestfs- VM
based tool auditing
| ^
| |
+------+
p2v, v2v
I think your demonstration only worked with a bit of luck. For v2v we
rewrite a lot of configuration files, install virtio drivers etc. In
terms of a formalized snap description, that process is a kind of
transformation.
How (if at all) does this apply to Windows?
Rich.
--
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
virt-p2v converts physical machines to virtual machines. Boot with a
live CD or over the network (PXE) and turn machines into Xen guests.
http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-p2v
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