What is the best/recomended/official way to backup VMs

[Etienne Goyer]

Jarl Friis wrote:
>> We run our servers 24/7, so suspending the virtual machines is not an
>> option.  My solution has been to store the disk images on lvm volumes and
>> take a snapshot of the lvm volume, then backup the disk images from the
>> snapshot.

I did that for a couple system in the past.  It is a nice hack, as long
as you understand that your snapshots are dynamic images of a running
systems and hence may not be coherent.

For example, if your system is running some form of database, you may
want to temporarily put the database read-only, commit pending writes
and *then* take the LVM snapshot.

-- 
Etienne Goyer
Technical Account Manager - Canonical Ltd
Ubuntu Certified Instructor

 ~= Ubuntu: Linux for Human Beings =~