Hi Mario.
I use the pause quite a bit to backup virtual machines. Pausing the
machine will flush the cache and complete all outstanding async IO.
https://www.virtualbox.org/pipermail/vbox-dev/2011-June/009810.html
Look for the ignoreflush property and set that.
VBoxManage setextradata "name"
\ "VBoxInternal/Devices/ahci/0/LUN#[x]/Config/IgnoreFlush"
As a note, I use iscsi targetsand zfs/solaris to host the data as zvols.
Snapshots aren't 100% guaranteed. If you have applications like
Exchangeconsider using something like VSS on Windows. For example, with
Exchange I use VSS and then snapshot the disks from inside the the VM
using putty/plink. Then I know I am getting a good copy of the data.
Other applications may havereplication options.
For things like SQL, I use a separate backup application to explicitly
backup the database, just to make sure.
Geoff
On 2017-02-06 03:36 PM, Mario Lobo wrote:
Hi to all.
Currently, my backup routine consists of shutting down all VMs, copy all
their .VDI files to the standby server, and restart the VMs.
The obvious reason is for the standby server to be ready to run the VMs
in case the primary server fails.
A few questions comes to mind:
1) Shutting down and restarting the VMs is always a lot of work, no to
mention the loss of counters, system statistics, etc ... so, is it safe
just to pause the VMs to copy the .VDIs over? Would a paused state .VDI
start ok on the standby server if I need to fire it up?
2) What is the proper procedure to backup via snapshots to a standby
machine that needs to be fully independent of the primary server?
Any experiences or recommendations are gratefully welcomed.
Thanks,
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