Re: [ovirt-users] Live VM Backups

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