[ovirt-users] Live VM Backups

[Soeren Malchow]

Dear Chris,

It is not true, you can snapshot a machine, then clone the snapshot and
export it for backup purposes after that you can remove the snapshot, all
on the live VM.
However, you need newer versions of libvirt to do that, right now we are
using CentOS 7.1 and the libvirt that comes with it is capable of doing
live merge which is necessary to achieve this.

But i have to warn you, we are experiencing a problem when removing the
snapshots (the part is commented in the attached script) it sometimes
kills virtual machines in a way that makes it necessary to put the
hypervisor to maintenance and then restart vdsmd and libvirtd before you
can start that VM again.

There is a bug filed already and it is in progress

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1231754

I also have to add that i newer version of libvirt (on Fedora 20 with the
libvirt preview repo) did not have that problem, so i am confident that
this will be solved soon.

Last but not least there is a plan to be able to export snapshots right
away for backup without having to clone them first, this is a huge step
forward for the backup procedure in terms of time that is needed and the
load on the storage and hypervisor systems.

I would really appreciate if you would help improving that script (we are
not python developers), i will see that i make this a github project or
something like that

Cheers
Soeren





On 08/07/15 17:13, "users-bounces at ovirt.org on behalf of Chris Jones -
BookIt.com Systems Administrator" <users-bounces at ovirt.org on behalf of
chris.jones at bookit.com> wrote:

> From what I can tell, you can only backup a VM to an export domain if
>the VM is shut down. Is a live VM backup not possible through oVirt? If
>not, why not? Most other virtualization tools can handle this.
>
>If it is possible, how do I do it through the backup API?
>api.vms.myvm.export requires it to be shutdown so what would the
>alternative be?
>
>Thanks.
>
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