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

[Mat]

This may be of use, although the author does state that it is a work in 
progress.
http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/BackupKVMGuest

Backing up a live virtual machine seems like a pretty logical thing, I'm 
somewhat surprised that what seems like a work-around with LVM is the 
best way to accomplish this.

Matoc


> Even if you are going to shutdown the virtual machines, you can still 
> use lvm snapshots to minimize your downtime.  Shutdown all your 
> virtual machines, take an lvm snapshot of the volume with the disk 
> images, then power back on your virtual machines.  Then you can back 
> up the disk images from the lvm snapshot and you don't have to wait 
> for the backup to complete before powering your machines back on.
>
> Brazen