Rudi Ahlers wrote:
2010/2/5 Simon Billis <simon@houxou.com mailto:simon@houxou.com>
Do you have any shared storage that you're using which supports snapshots? If you do, then a combination of coalescing the running VM's to disk and taking a snap and also using traditional backup methods (application aware) to disk/tape for archival and complete failure of the storage is a reasonable thing to do. S.the main problem with this, is that one client on that VM (think about shared hosting accounts on the VM) wants to restore a single file, or a few files, then you're going to have to restore the whole snapshot and a lot of other files will be lost.
I'm experimenting with an NFS mount from our backup server. Basically, export the NFS share, and mount it inside the VM, then use your favorite backup procedure / software. For our cPanel VM's, we use cPanel's native backup function which makes use of rsync - and allows us to restore a single file if needed. For other VM's without a control panel, rsync also works well.
For file by file backups, I always recommend backuppc as the first choice, especially in a situation where you have several hosts containing copies of the same files since backuppc will pool all the duplicates in its storage. Of course you may also want some less frequent image copies of the host for faster restores if you need to rebuild from scratch.