Hi
I am trying to create filesystem-consistent snapshots on an Ubuntu-8.10
Linux virtual machine running open-vm-tools. Instead of installing
VMware-tools on this virtual machine, I installed the open-vm-tools package
using the instructions documented in the following web-site:
http://www.gorillapond.com/2009/03/09/install-vmware-tools-on-ubuntu-linux-reborn/
Basically, my experiments involve performing a series of
file-create/vmware-snapshot operations. I create small text files using
'echo' or 'cat'. I then use the VMware Virtual Infrastructure SDK to take a
snapshot of the VM. When invoking the API function to take the snapshot
(it's called CreateSnapshot), I specify the 'quiesce' option which is
supposed to flush all dirty data buffers to disk.
After creating the various snapshots, I then revert back to each one of them
to verify that the appropriate files exist and each of them contains the
correct data. However, I find that this is not always the case, because the
dirty data buffers are not necessarily being flushed to disk.
VMware tech support told me that for Linux virtual machines, they do not
support the quiescing of the guest filesystem, hence they do not include the
vmsync module as part of the VMware tools. However, since open-vm-tools
includes the vmsync driver, I thought that by installing open-vm-tools on
the Ubuntu-8.10 machine, I could get this to work. Doing an 'lsmod'
verifies that vmsync is in fact loaded into the kernel. However, I don't
believe it is being invoked when I invoke a VMware-snapshot (either through
the SDK or the VI client).
Could you please tell me whether this is expected behavior? Does the vmsync
module only get invoked through the VCB program, or should it be triggered
simply by requesting a snapshot with filesystem quiescing enabled?
Thanks
Ashok
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