Hi Niki,
I'm using a similar approach like Stephen's, but with a kink.
- Kickstart all machines from a couple of ISOs, depending on the
requirements (the Kickstart process is controlled by Ansible)
- Machines that have persistent data (which make up about 50% in average)
have at least two virtual disk devices: The one for the OS (which gets overwritten by Kickstart when a machine is re-created), and another one for persistent data (which Kickstart doesn't touch)
- Ansible sets up everything on the base server Kickstart provides,
starting from basic OS hardening, authentication and ending with monitoring and backup of the data volume
- Backup is done via Bareos to a redundant storage server
That way I can reinitialise a VM at any time without having to care for the persistent data in most cases. If persistent data need to be restored as well, Bareos can handle that as soon as the machine has been set up via Ansible. OS files are never backed up at all.
Whenever I read such things I'm wondering, what about things like log files? Do you call them OS files or persistent data? How do you back'em up then?
Regards, Simon