On Mon, May 7, 2012 at 10:05 AM, Jonathan Bayer < [email protected]> wrote:
> I should say that the main servers are backed up by our hosting provider > (Rackspace), who wants nothing to do with the VMs Sorry this doesn't answer your question, I'm just curious. Rackspace offers Hybrid Hosting, which combines managed dedicated servers (bare-metal) with Cloud Servers (VMs). Considering how expensive the managed servers are, and how inexpensive the Cloud Servers are, it's hard to imagine a cost savings in running your own VM infrastructure on Rackspace hosting. Rackspace Cloud Servers includes a built-in backup function (free for limited use), which backs up to Cloud Files. So what is the advantage you are getting by running your own VM infrastructure? As a general answer to your question, the are two main approaches to backing up VMs. a) backup the full VM disk images/partitions. b) ignore that they are VMs and backup the data on the servers. I generally don't think full disk backups scale well, unless you have a backup system that does block-level dedup or incremental disk snapshots (you waste a lot of space backing up the OS). I favor using configuration management for all system configuration, and backing up only the data (databases, file shares, etc.). On Rackspace, if I didn't have too much data, I'd probably backup to Cloud Files (plus something else) with a script like this: http://libcloud.apache.org/docs/storage-examples.html Side note, MySQL replication isn't backup, you still need to backup the DB (with mysqldump or LVM snapshots). -Anton
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