[CentOS-virt] proper way to snapshot

Thu Apr 26 18:15:40 UTC 2012
Nux! <nux at li.nux.ro>

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.

-- 
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Nux!
www.nux.ro