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Re: [BackupPC-users] Backup of virtual machines
2016-07-04 09:10:01
On 4/07/2016 22:01, Smith, Graham -
Computing Technical Officer wrote:
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.
FYI, I use backuppc to backup the content of my VM's as above,
except I make use of my storage backend to assist (I use Xen instead
of XenServer, so some of this may not apply to your environment).
I use the pre-backup script from backuppc to connect to my SAN and
run a script which:
1) Takes a LVM snapshot of the VM (disk) to be backed up
2) Uses kpartx to scan for partitions
3) Uses mount to mount each partition on the SAN server at a VM
specific mountpoint
Then, backuppc will backup the VM specific mountpoint of the SAN
Finally, I use the post-backup script from backuppc to connect to my
SAN and run a cleanup script which reverses the above.
So far, this is working well for me.
PS, I also do remote off-site image backups, but I only have two
copies of the remote images, yesterday and current, where one of
those can be incomplete.
IMHO, you should do both file level backups of the contents, in case
a user accidentally deletes a file, or some crypto-locker virus, as
well as image level backups in case of crypto locker, malicious
damage, or serious system crash/disaster.
Emphasis placed on crypto locker solutions, been bitten and saved
more than once thanks to backups.
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Attend Shape: An AT&T Tech Expo July 15-16. Meet us at AT&T Park in San
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