[CentOS-virt] Backing up a running KVM guest

Thu Mar 26 12:31:23 UTC 2009
Kai Schaetzl <maillists at conactive.com>

Julian Price wrote on Wed, 25 Mar 2009 18:59:04 +0000:

> Thanks for the suggestion.

Another one, although I'm sure that some will loudly protest about it :-)
I've had excellent results with rsyncing the complete content of Xen VMs 
to other Xen VMs. It works flawlessly even for MySQL database in full 
swing. Maybe it makes a difference if you use InnoDB, I'm using MyISAM 
whereever I can for reasons of speed and robustness. I've rsynced even 
heavy use servers with no problems (did a lot of tests to make sure the 
results worked).
Before doing it this way I checked out the LVM snapshot options (e.g. 
mount a snapshot and rsync that snapshot) as this is usually recommended 
but found them not really fitting me. 

Kai

-- 
Kai Schätzl, Berlin, Germany
Get your web at Conactive Internet Services: http://www.conactive.com