Re: [Bacula-users] Backing up Xen virtual machines (LVM)
2014-05-06 15:03:50
On 5/6/2014 4:10 AM, Dawid Piotrowski
wrote:
Thank you for your insights, Josh, you've given me some
points to consider.
It would seem that for my intended purpose (restoration of
entire VMs) LVM snapshots are better suited. What I'm
wondering is whether an in-VM setup would also work for
restoring virtual machines. The scenario I envision is as
follows: I'm going to do full backups of VMs (including all
possible configuration files, but excluding /dev, /proc, /mnt,
/run, /sys). This way, if a VM fails entirely and is
unrecoverable otherwise, I can create a new instance from
scratch, then install bacula-fd on it, apply the original
config and restore the last full backup. This procedure should
effectively give me a clone of the original VM (not a clone in
strict sense, obviously). I have tried that on a test machine
and it worked OK but, inexperienced as I am with Bacula, I
might be missing some quirks here.
Does it seem like a reasonable plan or am I going to paint
myself into a corner with this one?
No. In that case restoring a VM is identical to restoring a physical
machine and no less reliable. What I do is create a bootable restore
image. This is done by creating a minimal VM with nothing but
minimal OS and bacula-fd and otherwise just network config and a
skeleton of the root filesystem with no actual data. Then dd the
root filesystem of the skeleton VM to a file that gets backed up
with the host server. To restore just dd the skeleton image to the
VMs LVM partition. Since the skeleton is made as small as possible,
use fdisk, kpartx and resize2fs or whatever is needed to resize the
VMs root partition and filesystem. Then just boot the VM and restore
as usual from bconsole. If the VM has other partitions then you will
have to manually create filesystems on them and mount them before
restoring. This just saves time over recreating completely from
scratch.
Best regards,
Dawid Piotrowski
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