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xen-users
Re: [Xen-users] cluster snapshots
On 6/13/2009 4:43 PM, Shirley Robles wrote:
Hi,
I am looking at doing LV cluster snapshots. I want to know if this is
possible and what is the procedure.
This has been a topic of discussion on the list multiple times. It
seems that the general advice is if you can do backup using software
inside of the guest domain, you should go that route and not try LVM.
If you are using a LV as a physical device for a guest domain, you can
do a snapshot of it in the host and take a backup of it. The problem is
that if the device is mounted read-write in the guest domain, when you
create the snapshot, you get a snapshot of a mounted volume. It would
be in a state similar to if you had just destroyed the guest causing an
unclean shutdown. In some cases, this state might still be useful. But
in others, it would yield a backup that isn't usable as not all of the
data has been written to the volume. So if you have something that is
critical or easily prone to data loss, I would recommend going another
route.
That all being said, if you still want to try doing this, you can use a
procedure similar to this to do it.
xm sysrq <guest> s # send a sysrq to the guest telling it to
sync its disks. hopefully reducing problems on unclean volumes
lvcreate -s -L 10GB -n guest-backup /path/to/guest/lv # create a
snapshot
mount /path/to/guest-backup /tmp/directory # mount the snapshot to a
temporary directory. Some will say you should fsck before doing this.
cd /tmp/directory
tar jcvf /path/to/backup.tar.bz2 * # this is how I do a backup on
mine, you can us other methods like rsync if you want
cd # get out of the mounted volume
umount /tmp/directory # unmountt the temporary snapshot
lvremove -f /path/to/guest-backup # destroy the LV snapshot
Hope that helps you out on this. Again, I recommend either using a
method of backup from inside the guest or shutting down the guest
during the backup. If you try this way, make sure you test restoring
from backup on to another vm to make sure your data is intact. And I
provide no warranty or guarantee on these direction. :)
Good Luck
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