[TriLUG] VM guests backup

[Leonard Boyle via TriLUG]

Hello Mauricio

Like almost all things, the answer is it depends.

First a disclaimer.

In the near past, I would have said that there was no backup api for lvm as
there is for vmware and hyper-v. But I did a search to check for this
 email and found that it turns out that there is.

https://access.redhat.com/discussions/685973

It appears that there is now an api for lvm and several vendors are
starting to work with the interface.


If you do not like the above  products based on price or feature set,

You alway have at least two classic ways to backup you lvm guests.

1) shutdown your virtual machine and backup up the storage that holds your
virtual machine bits. You can use snapshots to reduce down. If you do not
shutdown the vm, you will not be sure that you do not have bits in memory
that are not committed to the disk copy.

2) You can backup up the virtual machine as you would a physical machine.
This gives you the same feature sets, full, incremental, change blocks
only, etc.


How long to keep backup seems to be like asking  folks which editor they
think is best.

Given that

Do you have a higher authority that tells you the shortest time or the the
longest time to keep backups, For example company lawyers, health care
rules, accounting rules, etc.

Do you want a copy offsite, how far offsite.
Remember if you have data stored offsite with software mirroring, if
something bad happens to the primary copy. for example Malware, rm *,
undetected corrupted bits, bad applications the badness  will be mirrored
to the remote site.


There was a  talk at the local ISSA meeting where it was reported that
malware had infected a site undetected before all the good backups aged
out.

How long might it be between the time a problem is detected and a restore
is requested. This could easily be months or years.

PS the IBM TSM product and Netbackup had a library of calls that you can
use to write a client to use the backup server to store data from your
program, so you can write a program using the api.

Regards len boyle


On Tue, Oct 24, 2017 at 1:06 AM, Mauricio Tavares via TriLUG <
trilug at trilug.org> wrote:

>       How do you backup VM guests in kvm/ovirt/xen? I guess the
> question is how long to keep said backup. After all, if using lvm to
> store the guest filesystems, a lv snapshot would suffice for short
> term.
> --
> This message was sent to: len <boyle.len at gmail.com>
> To unsubscribe, send a blank message to trilug-leave at trilug.org from that
> address.
> TriLUG mailing list : https://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug
> Unsubscribe or edit options on the web  : https://www.trilug.org/
> mailman/options/trilug/boyle.len%40gmail.com
> Welcome to TriLUG: http://trilug.org/welcome