On Mon, May 7, 2012 at 2:58 PM, Anton Cohen <[email protected]> wrote:
> 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?
I find it hard to understand how such a big and obvious problem is so
often overlooked by "cloud people":
You don't have any control over the security of your data
Your data is the most important asset your company has, and it's
really disturbing to me that so many IT people are will to throw it up
into the cloud just for some marginal cost savings. The cost of
hardware is far, FAR from the largest cost you have (at least until
you reach a large scale), and the risk of cloud is not only not worth
it in many cases, it's irresponsible. You get what you pay for.
There's also no question that some industries absolutely cannot and
will not EVER place their data on third party cloud servers. These
industries are not too hard to think of, which makes it somewhat
insulting to ask such a question in the first place.
I'm sure I'll get flamed for this, and maybe I'm just old school.
> 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
❧ Brian Mathis
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