[ovirt-users] Re: How to Backup a VM

Struggling with bugs and issues on OVA export/import (my clear favorite otherwise, especially when moving VMs between different types of hypervisors), I've tried pretty much everything else, too. Export domains are deprecated and require quite a bit of manual handling. Unfortunately the buttons for the various operations are all over the place e.g. the activation and maintenance toggles are in different pages. In the end the mechanisms underneath (qemu-img) seem very much the same and suffer from the same issues (I have larger VMs that keep failing on imports). So far the only fool-proof method has been to use the imageio daemon to upload and download disk images, either via the Python API or the Web-GUI. Transfer times are terrible though, 50MB/s is quite low when the network below is 2.5-10Gbit and SSDs all around. Obviously with Python as everybody's favorite GUI these days, you can also copy and transfer the VMs complete definition, but I am one of those old guys, who might even prefer a real GUI to mouse clicks on a browser. The documentation on backup domains is terrible. What's missing behind the 404 link in oVirt becomes a very terse section in the RHV manuals, where you're basically just told that after cloning the VM, you should then move its disks to the backup domain... What you are then supposed to do with the cloned VM, if it's ok to simplay throw it away, because the definition is silently copied to the OVF_STORE on the backup... none of that is explained or mentioned. There is also no procedure for restoring a machine from a backup domain, when really a cloning process that allows a target domain would be pretty much what I'd vote for. Redhat really wants you to buy the professional product there, or use the Python GUI. I've sadly found the OVA files generated by oVirt (QEMU, really) to be incompatible with both VMware Workstation 15.5 and VirtualBox 6.12. No idea who's fault this is, but both sides are obviously not doing plug-fests every other week and I'm pretty sure this could be fixed manually when needed.