[Users] recommandations for saving backing up ovirt

[Ayal Baron]

----- Original Message -----
> Hi all,
> 
> I 'd like to receive any usefull advices from the community about good
> practice of backing up ovirt with the restraint of zero down time.
> This involves :
> 
> 
>     * saving vms without shutting down (Restoring them can be done with a
>     halt). Is live snapshot enough for this? Is lvm or san snapshot
>     recommended?

live snapshot gives you crash consistent points in time to return to, however, if you want a 'backup' which is stored externally and can then be restored in a different configuration etc then you'd need to utilize the backup API (live snapshot + attach the snap to a virtual appliance and then back it up).
live snapshots also integrate with the qemu guest agent so if you've deployed this then you can get better consistency (file systems would be quiesced on linux guests and on windows guests this should cause VSS to quiesce your apps as well).

If your storage supports snapshots and your VMs contain a single disk (direct lun) then you can snapshot the lun on the storage side and again get crash consistency.
If you could get this to work for you then performance wise this is probably the best option.
If your backup solution is integrated with your storage then even better.

>     * saving the postgres database (or only some of main tables). Can we do
>     it without stopping engine and the risk of a data corruption? Is there a
>     howto?
> 
> 
> Thank you for your help.
> --
> Nathanaël Blanchet
> 
> Supervision réseau
> Pôle exploitation et maintenance
> Département des systèmes d'information
> 227 avenue Professeur-Jean-Louis-Viala
> 34193 MONTPELLIER CEDEX 5
> Tél. 33 (0)4 67 54 84 55
> Fax  33 (0)4 67 54 84 14 blanchet at abes.fr
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Users mailing list
> Users at ovirt.org
> http://lists.ovirt.org/mailman/listinfo/users
>