Hi Dean, On 05/05/2010 03:11 PM, Dean Hildebrand wrote: > Right now, in order to quiesce the Guest OS file systems it is required to > take a VM snapshot. We would like to avoid taking this snapshot for > several reasons, most importantly disk space and performance.
Are those the only things you want to avoid? For disk space, quiesced snapshots don't include memory information, so you don't pay the largest cost of snapshots (the memory state file). The delta disks created are not large. For performance, there is a performance penalty, yes, but it's much lower than having to keep your VM's disks frozen while you make a copy of the whole vmdk file. With the snapshot, you can take as long as you want to copy the original vmdk file since the VM won't be modifying it, and the VM can still be alive and kicking (since it will be writing to the delta disk). Then after you backup the vmdk you can delete the snapshot and solve both problems. > I've looked into the vmsync module, and it looks like we could manually > call the ioctl to freeze/thaw the file systems. Has anyone tried this > before? Do people think it would work with ESX 4? You could do that, but I'd really encourage you to just use regular snapshots since it will be a lot safer. Also, since 2.6.29, the vanilla Linux kernel already supports ioctls that do pretty much the same thing as vmsync does (for all filesystems, not just XFS as it previously did), without the need for our kernel driver. -- - Marcelo ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ open-vm-tools-devel mailing list open-vm-tools-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/open-vm-tools-devel
