On Sat, Jul 23, 2011 at 11:10:51AM -0700, Gregory K. Ruiz-Ade wrote: > Correct me if I'm wrong, but I had the understanding that neither Xen nor KVM > were capable of doing VMware-style full-state snapshots at all. I don't > recall seeing the feature when I was last using XenServer and I know from > experience that the only snapshotting available on plain Linux distributions > is to either use LVM and use a logical volume as the VM's "disk", or disk > images with a tool like qemu-img. > > Neither alternative preserves full VM state, though, so if you do a snap on > Xen or KVM while the VM is running, it's crash-consistent at best.
to take a full state backup, you must snapshot both the ram and the disk separately. 'xm save' is the tool to do this to the ram state. For disk, personally, I use lvm, which has it's own snapshot mechanism. I have a backup script [1] that demonstrates how you can 'xm save' (which pauses the domain) then take a LVM snapshot while the domain is paused, then 'xm restore' which starts the domain. You can avoid the downtime using xm save -c and some scripting, but I have not done so myself. [1]http://book.xen.prgmr.com/mediawiki/index.php/Backup_domain -- Luke S. Crawford http://prgmr.com/xen/ - Hosting for the technically adept http://nostarch.com/xen.htm - We don't assume you are stupid. _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
