[ovirt-users] Manually starting VMs via vdsClient (HE offline)

[Dan Yasny]

On Thu, Feb 9, 2017 at 11:00 AM, Doug Ingham <dougti at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> On 9 February 2017 at 12:03, Dan Yasny <dyasny at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>
>> On Thu, Feb 9, 2017 at 9:55 AM, Doug Ingham <dougti at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Hi Dan,
>>>
>>> On 8 February 2017 at 18:26, Dan Yasny <dyasny at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> But seriously, above all, I'd recommend you backup the engine (it comes
>>>> with a utility) often and well. I do it via cron every hour in production,
>>>> keeping a rotation of hourly and daily backups, just in case. It doesn't
>>>> take much space or resources, but it's more than just best practice - that
>>>> database is the summary of the entire setup.
>>>>
>>>>
>>> If you don't mind, may I ask what process you use for backing up your
>>> engine? If you use HE, do you keep one server dedicated to just that VM?
>>> I've not had that particular issue in the restore process yet, however I
>>> read that it's recommended the HE host is free of virtual load before the
>>> backup takes place. And as they need to be done frequently, I'm reading
>>> that as a dedicated host...
>>>
>>>
>> If you use a dedicated host, you might as well abandon self hosted. HE is
>> nice for small setups with the HA built in for extra fun, but once you
>> scale, it might not be able to cope and you'll need real hardware. You're
>> running a heavy-ish java engine plus two databases after all.
>>
>> So as I said, all I do is add the engine-backup command to cron on the
>> engine, and then my backup server comes in and pulls out the files via scp,
>> also through cron. Nothing fancy really, but it lets me sleep at night
>>
>
> This particular project has 10 new maxed out servers to back it, and I
> don't see it outgrowing that for at least a year or so. It's hardly a full
> DC.
> I presume the DB will become the heaviest part of the load, and I'm
> already planning a separate high I/O environment for dedicated HA DB hosts.
>
> See the top section of this page:
> http://www.ovirt.org/documentation/self-hosted/
> chap-Backing_up_and_Restoring_an_EL-Based_Self-Hosted_Environment
>
> It seems that I'll always have to keep at least one host free to be able
> to avoid restore problems. If not, and I were to keep hourly backups, then
> migrating VMs off the host every hour would just be a pain.
>

Yeah, that's another downside to using HE I suppose. Though maybe you don't
need to be as paranoid as I am and do backups out of hours once per day,
which will be much less disruptive.

This is pretty easy to script with the SDK - just connect to the API with a
python script and deactivate a host. Once it's in maintenance, run
engine-backup and pull the backup out, then activate the host again.


>
>
> --
> Doug
>
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