[CentOS-virt] proper way to snapshot
aurfalien
aurfalien at gmail.com
Thu Apr 26 17:48:01 EDT 2012
On Apr 26, 2012, at 2:24 PM, Nux! wrote:
> On 26.04.2012 19:21, aurfalien wrote:
>> On Apr 26, 2012, at 2:15 PM, Nux! wrote:
>>
>>> On 26.04.2012 19:12, aurfalien wrote:
>>>> On Apr 26, 2012, at 1:54 PM, Nux! wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> On 26.04.2012 18:23, aurfalien wrote:
>>>>>> Hi,
>>>>>>
>>>>>> While there are a few howtos floating around, what is the
>>>>>> standard
>>>>>> way to snapshot guests?
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I went through and converted from raw to pre allocated meta data
>>>>>> qcow2 images for this purpose.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Some howtos suggest to do an xml snapshot file as so;
>>>>>>
>>>>>> <domainsnapshot>
>>>>>> <name>UbuntuServer_10.10-16032011</name>
>>>>>> <description>Snapshot of OS install and updates</description>
>>>>>> </domainsnapshot>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> And then to run as so;
>>>>>>
>>>>>> virsh snapshot-create UbuntuServer_10.10
>>>>>> UbuntuServer_10.10-ss.xml
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Seems a bit over kill.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I was thinking more along the lines of this;
>>>>>>
>>>>>> qemu-img snapshot -c $date $filename
>>>>>>
>>>>>> qemu-img convert -f qcow2 -O qcow2 -s $date $filename
>>>>>> $filename-$date
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Or something like this.Anyways, hoping to see how you all are
>>>>>> doing
>>>>>> this for best practice sort of thing.
>>>>>
>>>>> Hi,
>>>>>
>>>>> I just use LVM snapshots; it's the fastest, most reliable way I
>>>>> could
>>>>> come with.
>>>>
>>>> Hi,
>>>>
>>>> I don't have LVMs.
>>>>
>>>> But if I did, would it be possible to only snapshot a directory or
>>>> will it snapshot the entire file system?
>>>
>>> Assuming you use LVM on the host to provide the virtual machine with
>>> a
>>> (virtual) HDD, then snapshotting that will obviously be (virtual)
>>> disk-wise.
>>
>> I used a simple non LVM partitioning scheme.
>>
>> Can I do directory based snapshots in LVM or is it the entire FS?
>>
>> I can re implement or redo my host to use LVM.
>>
>> - aurf
>> _______________________________________________
>> CentOS-virt mailing list
>> CentOS-virt at centos.org
>> http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos-virt
>
> Aurf,
>
> LVM is filesystem level, not directory level. What I'd recommend is to
> reinstall and use LVM, make a couple of volumes for / and swap and leave
> the rest for virtual machines.
The real problem with this is that snapshots are still on the local box and I don't have a SAN.
With KVM based qcow snaps, I can do snaps over NFS.
- aurf
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