Greg wrote:
I think I am getting closer to ideas as to how to back this up. I will do as
you said to backup the os, take an image or something of that nature. I will
take a full backup every one to three months of the virtual machines, however
the data that the vm is working with will be mounted seperately so that if the
virtual machine goes down all that is needed is to restore the last backup of
the vm and mount the storage and we should be up and running. Now my only worry
is how to backup data that the vm's are accessing. I guess my question is this:
Say I take a full backup every x amount of days, say 7 so weekly backups. I
then take snapshots throughout the week. Then something happens and there is a
flood or something. Once I have all hardware and that side of things going, can
I restore from that full backup and then apply the snapshots to it. Will I then
be up to yesterday backup wise or are those snapshots useless and I am up to
last week.
Thanks for helping!
Greg
Backups on VMs work exactly the same way as backups of every other
stuff. You just have 2 Operating systems to worry about (one inside
another). At the end of the day, backing up a guest OS is no different
from backing up a database (where you have to copy files in a consistent
way).
So, without more filosoffies, you have to backup the following:
- Host OS (Linux runniing vmware esx)
- Guest OS
- Applications and files
For the Host OS you're cleared (use dump or whatever)
For the guest OS, Vmware has a cloning hability that you can use right
after the guest machine's installation and have a baseline of each
guest. The cloning makes a full clone off the guest so, files and
applications will also be backed up. Except for performance there is no
reason for not doing a clone every day - in fact, you could very well
test this option and see how it works out for you (in multiple TB of
VMs it will work badly but, you may see that it is a viable option for
some cases). If you can afford an offline backup then, it's even easier
since you're now backing up a file in a Linux system.
Snapshots of data in use by an VM guest OS work in the exact same way as
they work if the data would be used by an real machine. If you're
talking about static files, they work fine, files that need to be
consistent amoung themselfs, they became trash.
Once you enter inside a VM's guest you can even install your favorite
backup client. you have all the options you have today for backuing up
stuff. You just have one more that is to do it from the outside of the
VM by freezing it and copying it all to other place
PS. You're welcomed but, If I'm taking you closer to a VM deployment I'm
not really helping you, just answering your questions :)
PPS. Is it ok to discuss this in here? It's not exactly Opensolaris
related, ...
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