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] Re: How to Backup and Restore MBR within Logical Volume

On Thu, Nov 12, 2009 at 5:10 PM, Mr. Teo En Ming (Zhang Enming)
<space.time.universe@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I don't think I will be using the LVM snapshot method. I will simply ensure
> that my domU is not running,

Ah, so you can live with the down time. It makes things a lot simpler then.

> then I proceed to do the losetup and kpartx
> procedure.

Like others mentioned, you don't need losetup for LVs. It will only
make things slower.

> Subsequently I will backup the MBR of my domU by dd-ing
> /dev/loopX and clone all the filesystems of the domU using fsarchiver.
>
> I would like to use fsarchiver because it can support LZMA compression. LZMA
> can compress better than bzip2 and decompress 3x faster than bzip2.
> partimage only supports gzip and bzip2.


If your concern is the size and speed of backup, here's one final note
from me: you might want to look at zfs. Possible use scenarios :
- use opensolaris as dom0. Probably the most supported option when it
comes to xen + zfs, but you need to be familiar with how opensolaris
works.
- use external storage server running solaris/opensolaris as iscsi
SAN. Think of it as poor-man's Netapp.
- use zfs-fuse inside Linux dom0, and store domU storage as files
- use zfs-fuse on domU, and do backup from domU instead of dom0.

With zfs, you'd get zfs snapshot (which is like instaneous in-place
backup), incremental block-level send (can greatly reduce backup
storage size if your data doesn't change often), optional transparent
compression for live data (like what ntfs has).

-- 
Fajar

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

<Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread>