Re: [Xen-users] Windows guest, swap space, separate disk?

[Brandon Lamb <brandonlamb@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Mar 17, 2010 at 10:29 PM, Brandon Lamb <brandonlamb@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 17, 2010 at 10:23 PM, Nathan Eisenberg
> <nathan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> First and foremost - I believe LVM's are faster than disk images, so if 
>> you're looking for performance, I would start there.
>>
>> Best Regards,
>> Nathan Eisenberg
>>
>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: xen-users-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:xen-users-
>>> bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Brandon Lamb
>>> Sent: Wednesday, March 17, 2010 3:06 PM
>>> To: xen-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>>> Subject: [Xen-users] Windows guest, swap space, separate disk?
>>>
>>> Hi hopefully someone can give me a tip or a better google search query
>>> to run.
>>>
>>> Talking to a guy that has a vmware server setup with 20 guests, all
>>> xp. He set them up with a 10gig os drive (c) and a separate 5gig disk
>>> image (d) that he configured a 3500-5000 swap.
>>>
>>> Now my take on this is that since all the disks are on the same
>>> physical disk anyway, should we just configured a single 15gig disk
>>> image, configure a 5000-5000 (min/max in windows) swap file for
>>> windows and be the same?
>
> Im actually running the disk images on top of lvm partitions, but this
> particular use case requires file based disks for our customer,
> basically a reseller of our service. He wants to offer HIS customers
> the ability that if they blow up their windows xp box, he can just
> relaunch the vm pointing to the backup disk image.
>
> To do this, it seemed much easier to be able to do a cp live-disk.img
> backup-disk.img versus doing a dd or ? to create a backup.
>
> Hm actually does anyone have any input on that? is "cp file1 file2"
> faster than a "dd if=/dev/volumes/file1 of=/dev/volumes/file2"?
>

Although a problem with the all lvm block level method is ok so when
we create a manual backup of the live disk, we would do

dd if=/dev/volumes/cust1-live of=/dev/volumes/cust1-backup

This only will happen once in a great while, after major software
changes and such. But now we also want a remote backup machine to have
a DR copy of cust1-backup, so disk space wise we would have to have

(size of cust1-live) + (size of cust1-backup) + (size of dd
if=/dev/volumes/cust1-backup of=/backups/cust1.img)

Hah hope that is not over complicating it but not sure how else you
would handle that

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