WARNING - OLD ARCHIVES

This is an archived copy of the Xen.org mailing list, which we have preserved to ensure that existing links to archives are not broken. The live archive, which contains the latest emails, can be found at http://lists.xen.org/
   
 
 
Xen 
 
Home Products Support Community News
 
   
 

xen-users

Re: [Xen-users] Xen backups using LVM Snapshots

If you were running a single OS with lvm snapshots (IE, no xen), would
the snapshots be consistent? IE, no fsck needed ever for the snapshots?
If so, then there must be a mechanism for LVM snapshotting to tell the
file system to coalesce to disk before the snapshot.

If there is such a connection between the LVM snapshotter and the file
system, I could see it not working properly if the LVM snapshotter is in
dom0 and the file system in domU. Perhaps a xen extension could be added
to support that?

Kevin

On Thu, 2008-10-16 at 19:12 -0700, Javier Guerra Giraldez wrote:
> On Thursday 16 October 2008, Mike Lovell wrote:
> > Javier Guerra wrote:
> > > On Wed, Oct 15, 2008 at 2:17 AM,  <lists@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > >> Each DomU with a database has a cron that dumps the db with
> mysqldump.
> > >> Later on, Dom0 will do an LVM Snapshot of all DomUs and then do a
> file
> > >> system backup of the Snapshots.  I do no actions on the DomUs.
> No
> > >> shutdown or 'xm pause/save/...'
> > >
> > > as you must have seen already, those snapshots mount as 'dirty'
> > > filesystems, since they're exact copies of an already mounted
> > > filesystem.  therefore, you have to run fsck on mount (usually
> > > automatic on journalling filesystems).  depending on the
> journalling
> > > algorithm, you risk having non-written data.
> >
> > This isn't sounding quite right to me. According to LVM Howto on
> > tldp.org a snapshot is "exact copy of a logical volume, frozen at
> some
> > point in
> time." (http://tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/snapshotintro.html).
> 
> right; but if that "point in time" was while it was mounted, the
> snapshot is
> exactly that: a non-unmounted volume.  just the same you would've got
> if you
> had pulled the plug on a running machine.  when you mount the
> snapshot, pay
> attention to warning messages, they'll tell the volume was dirty and
> run
> fsck.
> 
> --
> Javier
> 
> 
> plain text document attachment (ATT566064.txt), "ATT566064.txt"
> _______________________________________________
> Xen-users mailing list
> Xen-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> http://lists.xensource.com/xen-users


_______________________________________________
Xen-users mailing list
Xen-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.xensource.com/xen-users