Hello,
On Mon, 2009-06-01 at 21:53 -1000, Hydro Meteor wrote:
> Hello all --
>
> As the world continues to ramp up into the use of virtual machine
> systems more and more, its becoming quite an interesting world to live
> in with regard to storage systems and backups of these virtual machine
> files. The main virtual machine systems such as those by VMWare (I.e.,
> VMWare Fusion that runs on Mac OS X which is similar if I'm not
> mistaken to VMWare Workstation) offer useful options such as snapshots
> and rollbacks.
>
> One of the consequences of having a lot of virtual machine snapshots
> around on a file system is that its easy for these virtual machine
> image files on the host OS's filesystem to become quite large
> relatively speaking (it would be easy to have multiple virtual
> machines for example whose file sizes on the host OS's filesystem are
> well into the multiple Gigabytes). I have noticed that if one merely
> boots up a virtual machine, its (relatively large) image file will
> change (even if the actual changes within the virtual machine were
> scant).
>
> Given this context and Bacula, from a file system standpoint, backing
> up differentials or incrementals of these large image files on a
> regular basis could easily start to become problematic, perhaps not so
> much with respect to Bacula Volumes (whether tape, optical disc, hard
> drive, etc. because one might argue that storage is cheap and Kryder's
> Law [1] marches on), but much more so is the issue of network
> bandwidth (where distributed backups are leveraged, which is one of
> Bacula's greatest strengths) -- moving gigabyte-scale files can be a
> problem. Even Amazon, which sells their S3 storage service, has
> recently offered a beta of their new AWS Import/Export service ("ship
> us that disk!"):
>
> http://aws.amazon.com/importexport/
>
> http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2009/05/send-us-that-data.html
>
> AWS Import/Export: Ship Us That Disk!
>
> Since station wagons and tapes are both on the verge of
> obsolescence, others have updated this nugget of wisdom to
> reference DVDs and Boeing 747s.
> Hard drives are getting bigger more rapidly than internet
> connections are getting faster. It is now relatively easy to
> create a collection of data so large that it cannot be
> uploaded to offsite storage (e.g. Amazon S3) in a reasonable
> amount of time. Media files, corporate backups, data collected
> from scientific experiments, and potential AWS Public Data
> Sets are now at this point. Our customers in the scientific
> space routinely create terabyte data sets from individual
> experiments.
>
> This brings me to a question which is, what about a future version of
> Bacula that would be able to perform block level backups of
> differentials and incrementals? That way, if say a 4 GB file
> (representing a virtual machine for example) had only a small number
> of disk level blocks that changed, only those blocks would need to be
> backed up relative to an initial Full backup? I imagine one argument
> might be to just install Bacula on every virtual machine ever created,
> but that's not practical. Seeing that Amazon is trying to solve the
> problem of backups and bandwidth, it strikes me as if Bacula could
> help to scratch this itch as well?
>
I agree, this would be a nice feature, not only for virtual machine
images.
But if you install bacula inside a virtual machine you can restore
individual files. If you backup images you can only restore full
images.
Ulrich
> Cheers,
>
> -hydro
>
> [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Kryder
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> OpenSolaris 2009.06 is a cutting edge operating system for enterprises
> looking to deploy the next generation of Solaris that includes the latest
> innovations from Sun and the OpenSource community. Download a copy and
> enjoy capabilities such as Networking, Storage and Virtualization.
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--
Ulrich Leodolter <ulrich.leodolter AT obvsg DOT at>
Oesterreichische Bibliothekenverbund und Service GmbH
Bruennlbadgasse 17/2A, A-1090 Wien
Fax +43 1 4035158-30
Tel +43 1 4035158-21
Web http://www.obvsg.at
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
OpenSolaris 2009.06 is a cutting edge operating system for enterprises
looking to deploy the next generation of Solaris that includes the latest
innovations from Sun and the OpenSource community. Download a copy and
enjoy capabilities such as Networking, Storage and Virtualization.
Go to: http://p.sf.net/sfu/opensolaris-get
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