[virt-tools-list] Would this suffice to backup a local vm image?

[Kenneth Armstrong]

It will be safer when it is shutdown.  That's what I was intending.

Right now, I'm just asking about local storage (from a hard drive that
the host is on, where the original image is stored, to an external USB
hard drive).  I tried this out, and it seemed to work fine.  I would
just copy the backed up disk image to /var/lib/libvirt/images and edit
the host's xml file to reflect the new storage location, and bring it
up in virt manager.

I would definitely use backup software from within the guest for
primary back ups, I was just trying to find another avenue as well by
utilizing the guest vm's inherent portability of it just being a
couple of files that constitute the vm.

I did try this with virt-clone, and it worked out well, since the
intent was to backup the whole guest image.

-Kenny

On Wed, Feb 2, 2011 at 8:30 AM, Richard W.M. Jones <rjones at redhat.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 01, 2011 at 09:46:25AM -0500, Kenneth Armstrong wrote:
>> I finally have a non-rhev related question.
>>
>> Would this suffice to back up a virtual machine to external media,
>> that could be later imported into virt-manager to run on another
>> system?
>>
>> run:
>> virt-clone (back up the disk image to external media)
>> virsh dumpxml vm > /backup/media/vm.xml
>>
>> Or is this not going to work?
>
> I assume also from the question that this is really about copying
> guests from one host to another, perhaps for DR?  If instead what you
> really want to do is take regular backups, then the recommended
> solution is to install your favourite backup software inside the guest
> and back it up like a regular machine.
>
> But assuming this is about copying and DR ...
>
> It depends on whether the guest is running, and also on how
> 'virt-clone' performs the copy of the disk image.  To be honest I
> wouldn't bother with 'virt-clone'; it is a distraction.  Look at the
> disk images directly.
>
> What format are the disk images?  (raw, qcow2, ...)
>
> Are they files, LVs, partitions, iSCSI LUNs, other ...?
>
> Can your storage system take snapshots?
>
> Do you want this to work when the VM is live, or will the VM be shut down?
>
> 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
>