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

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Tue, Apr 12, 2011 at 11:10:34AM -0300, Bruno Lamps wrote:
> 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 (!!!).

(!)  No, this is not safe.

> 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?

You are best to install some backup software into the virtual machine.
Treat the virtual machine like it was a physical machine and back it
up with some software which is aware of what's going on inside.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
virt-top is 'top' for virtual machines.  Tiny program with many
powerful monitoring features, net stats, disk stats, logging, etc.
http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-top