[ovirt-users] deprecating export domain?

Pavel Gashev Pax at acronis.com
Tue Oct 3 15:38:33 UTC 2017


Shubham,

I hope you’re going to keep the Export feature at least as “Clone to another storage domain”. In the real life, the copy-in/copy-out is required for backups. Moving disks between Data SD and Backup SD is not a way to backup or restore. It’s often required to keep VM runnable during backing up, and it’s often required to keep a backup during restoring. Typical backup storage is not designed for running VMs directly. SSDs are not cheap enough for storing backups, and there are HDDs especially designed for storing cold data [1]. Thus, the disaster recovery scenario is a great feature, but it can’t be a recommended way to recover.

And I hope you are going to show VMs on backup storages in a separate list (“Backups” instead of “Virtual Machines”).

[1] http://www.seagate.com/enterprise-storage/hard-disk-drives/archive-hdd/

I hope this helps.

From: shubham dubey <sdubey504 at gmail.com>
Date: Monday, 2 October 2017 at 19:10
To: Pavel Gashev <Pax at acronis.com>
Cc: Maor Lipchuk <mlipchuk at redhat.com>, "users at ovirt.org" <users at ovirt.org>
Subject: Re: [ovirt-users] deprecating export domain?

Yes, I just gave an example case. If you want to use vms with a backup, then you can just copy that vm or disk into another domain and make it as backup domain as you do it in export domain.
In simple language, main aim of creating backup domain is just to use all the features available in export domain without creating a dedicated export domain.
Hope you understand now:)



On 2 Oct 2017 8:55 pm, "Pavel Gashev" <Pax at acronis.com<mailto:Pax at acronis.com>> wrote:
Shubham,

I don’t really understand the process you described. If I need to backup the whole datacenter, you say I have to turn off all VMs, and make them non-runnable. It doesn’t look like a backing up. It looks like an archiving. But what if I need to keep my VMs running?


From: shubham dubey <sdubey504 at gmail.com<mailto:sdubey504 at gmail.com>>
Date: Monday, 2 October 2017 at 15:55
To: Charles Kozler <ckozleriii at gmail.com<mailto:ckozleriii at gmail.com>>
Cc: Pavel Gashev <Pax at acronis.com<mailto:Pax at acronis.com>>, users <users at ovirt.org<mailto:users at ovirt.org>>, Maor Lipchuk <mlipchuk at redhat.com<mailto:mlipchuk at redhat.com>>
Subject: Re: [ovirt-users] deprecating export domain?

Hi,
The backup storage domain is quite like export storage domain but with easy usability.
Since you can change any data domain into backup domain any time, you not need to create a dedicated
export storage domain for backup or disaster recovery purpose. Altough its working is same as export sd.
The process of backup can be as simple as this:
1) turn off all the vms in your storage domain
2) select backup flag to convert that into backup domain.
Once the domain is used for backup, you cannot make any changes to its vms, disk etc as mentioned by maor.
And yes, you can convert export sd to data domain using cli script but it is not required anymore.
If in future export storage domain get deprecated, you not need to be worry about that much since you can convert all your
export sd into data domain anytime and start using backup feature instead.
Regards,
Shubham


On Mon, Oct 2, 2017 at 6:04 PM, Charles Kozler <ckozleriii at gmail.com<mailto:ckozleriii at gmail.com>> wrote:
Thank you for clearing this up for me everyone. My concern that something like the export domain wasnt going to exist and it was just going to be deprecated with no alternative. Glad to hear all the news of the SD

On Mon, Oct 2, 2017 at 8:31 AM, Pavel Gashev <Pax at acronis.com<mailto:Pax at acronis.com>> wrote:
Maor,

Could you please clarify, what would be the process of making backup of a running VM to an existing backup storage domain?

I’m asking because it looks like the process is going to be quite the same:
1. Clone VM from a snapshot
2. Move the cloned VM to a backup storage domain

An ability of choosing destination storage for cloned VMs would increase backup efficiency. On the other hand, an ability of exporting VM from a snapshot would increase the efficiency in the same way even without creating new entity.

Indeed, Backup SDs would increase efficiency of disaster recovery. But the same would be achieved by converting Export SDs to Data SDs using a small CLI utility.


On 01/10/2017, 15:32, "users-bounces at ovirt.org<mailto:users-bounces at ovirt.org> on behalf of Maor Lipchuk" <users-bounces at ovirt.org<mailto:users-bounces at ovirt.org> on behalf of mlipchuk at redhat.com<mailto:mlipchuk at redhat.com>> wrote:

    On Sun, Oct 1, 2017 at 2:50 PM, Nir Soffer <nsoffer at redhat.com<mailto:nsoffer at redhat.com>> wrote:
    >
    > Attaching and detaching data domain was not designed for backing up vms.
    > How would you use it for backup?
    >
    > How do you ensure that a backup clone of a vm is not started by mistake,
    > changing the backup contents?

    That is a good question.
    We recently introduced a new feature called "backup storage domain"
    which you can mark the storage domain as backup storage domain.
    That can guarantee that no VMs will run with disks/leases reside on
    the storage domain.
    The feature should already exist in oVirt 4.2 (despite a bug that
    should be handled with this patch https://gerrit.ovirt.org/#/c/81290/)
    You can find more information on this here:
      https://github.com/shubham0d/ovirt-site/blob/41dcb0f1791d90d1ae0ac43cd34a399cfedf54d8/source/develop/release-management/features/storage/backup-storage-domain.html.md

    Basically the OVF that is being saved in the export domain should be
    similar to the same one that is being saved in the OVF_STORE disk in
    the storage domain.
    If the user manages replication on that storage domain it can be
    re-used for backup purposes by importing it to a setup.
    Actually it is much more efficient to use a data storage domain than
    to use the copy operation to/from the export storage domain.

    >
    > Nir
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