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

[James Dinkel]

On Tue, Aug 11, 2009 at 8:55 AM, Etienne Goyer
<etienne.goyer at canonical.com>wrote:

> 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.
>

Yeah it would absolutely be prudent to quiesce your virtual machines before
backing them up.  For Windows virtual machines, I'm not even sure where I
would start to try and do that from the host.  For linux virtual machines,
you could ssh in and run the necessary commands, but that takes time, which
I have not gotten to yet.  For the time being, they are crash-consitent
backups at least.

Brazen
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-server/attachments/20090811/d6232403/attachment.html>