Re: [BackupPC-users] Backup of virtual machines

I don't use xenserver but my generic advice as a strategy would be to backup the contents of the VMs rather than the raw virtual disks.

Effetively treating the guests as if they were physical systems. The raw virtual disk files will be large but also non-unique so will cost a lot more

in storage space in your backups and potentially take a lot more time to backup. Backing up the files contained within the VMs should save space

with BackupPC in taking full advantage of single instance storage of repeated files in your pool common to many users or host systems.

Invariably it is the data rather than an operating system that is usually most important to keep, so you may choose to only keep a subset within each VM

of the unique data and configs etc. However it may be no harm to include a single backup of a "template" of your base operating system of the VM to which

you may subsequently restore data files to, particularly if your guest OS are heavily customised and rebuilds are complex or time consuming

to recreate from scratch.

That may aid a quicker recovery situation and gives you a hypervisor and potentially OS agnostic recovery option route should you need it compared

to say taking VM system state snapshots and backing those up for example.

_____________________________________
Graham Smith
Technical Officer
Department of Computing
Institute of Technology Tallaght
Tallaght
Dublin 24
Ireland

From: Elias Pereira [mailto:empbilly AT gmail DOT com]
Sent: 04 July 2016 02:30
To: General list for user discussion questions and support <backuppc-users AT lists.sourceforge DOT net>
Subject: [BackupPC-users] Backup of virtual machines

Hello guys,

What the best way to backup VMs from xenserver?

Thanks in advance!

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