[virt-tools-list] Best way to backup my VMs

[Bruno Lamps]

Hi,

I'm slowly upgrading the virtualization infrastructure in the company I work
for (a local SMB, in Brazil's northeast), from old Xen vms to upgraded KVM
machines. At this moment, we already have important systems, like our proxy
and our credit-card processing machine, running in production with KVM for
about 60 days. We are just a few weeks away to delete our last xen machine,
and be running only KVM guests in our servers.

Our old backup solution - not implemented by me - consists in rsync the xen
VM disk images every night in other servers, while the zen VMs still
running. I don't think it's a safe backup, and the only time I needed to
restore a backup made this way, the restored machine suffered data
corruption, mailboxes were lost (!!!).

So I see this migration from xen to KVM as an opportunity to put some decent
backup running here. And I need suggestions. =]

Is it possible to "pause" a machine with a simple command, rsync the
machine's HD image in other computer and then safelly resume the machine? Is
it necessary to shut down the virtual machine, in order to make this backup?

Thanks in advance for any suggestion, and sorry about my broken english. ;D

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Att,
Bruno Menezes
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