[ovirt-users] Live VM Backups

[Chris Jones - BookIt.com Systems Administrator]

Thanks, Soeren. I'll give it a look.

On 07/08/2015 03:36 PM, Soeren Malchow wrote:
> 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