On Tue, Aug 12, 2008 at 6:13 AM, Ronald Buder <rbuder AT proficom-ag DOT de>
wrote:
> Hi
>
>>I have some experience with backing up virtual machines snapshot,
>
In vmware server 1.0x ! Providing scripts would be great!
- How do I create a snopshat via somekind of script?
- How do I put "database into a consistent (sleep) state "
- This will export " vmdk-files" That get backed up by bacula? Correct?
- Is that all?
- How do I restore the whole vmware in case of system crash?
- DB vmware needs to be shut down correct? (I saw some stop/start
scripts on google, Is there something specific that they need to do?
Lucas
> Of course, your example points out a crucial problem with virtual
> machines. Doing backups from outside a VM is tricky. However, there are
> such things as pre run scripts that could trigger backup procedures
> within the VM, put the database into a consistent (sleep) state and
> therefore ensure valid backups.
>
>>It make whole environment completely inconsistent, so I prefer shut
>>down the
>>virtual machine, make a snapshot and backup - power it up. Or use a
>>backup
>>directly from operating system. I think backing up such a large files,
>>which
>>changes not often without incremental way is wasting of storage, time
>>and in
>>some cases may be useless.
>
> Here's what we do (just to give you an idea, we have a total of approx.
> 90 ESX-Servers at the moment and run close to 800 VMs and the
> environment is continouisly growing):
> We're using VCB (VMware Consolidated Backup, quite useful actually). The
> tool will take care of your VMs, snapshot them, export the vmdk-files in
> 2GB sized snippets (no worries about large files) and all that can be
> done via SAN, network or whichever you prefer. If you care, I can supply
> you with simple scripts that will take care of most of the hazzle.
> There's also a huge advantage of using VCB over doing manual
> snapshotting and having Bacula: the extracted files will be slightly
> larger only than the actual used space within the VM. Say you have a
> 100GB sparse file, the VM's data covers about 40GB, then the export will
> be approx. 41GB large.
> You're right of course, that there is no such thing as an incremental
> backup. However, as long as you're not concerned with the VM's internas,
> a backup from "outside" is the best thing I can think of. We've been
> running a setup like that for several months now and never had serious
> problems. Backing up a running Windows, Linux or Solaris VM, restoring
> it somewhere else and booting it up worked properly in every occassion.
> If you're running such things as a proxy server, gateways and similar
> stuff, I'd say that's the way to go. For DB-servers etc. there should be
> a set time to do backups. You could, within that time-windows, shutdown
> the box which would ensure that there are no open sessions, files,
> connections and the DBs and others would be in a consistent state, fire
> away the backup (which will at the very first stage create a snapshot of
> the VM's disks) and then startup the VM again right away. Downtime can
> be reduced to mere minutes.
>
> This all will work in static VM-Server environments just as well as in
> highly dynamic Virtual Infrastructure [tm] environments with DRS enabled
> etc. I those cases you'd just have to think it over a bit more and
> create custom shutdown and startup scripts to shutdown and power off
> running virtual machines automatically without knowing where they
> actually reside within the cluster. Feel free to ask...
>
> Anyways, time for lunch, gotta run...
>
>>
>>Best regards,
>>Marcin
>
> Ronald
>
>
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