Hi, On Fri, Apr 27, 2012 at 12:48 AM, aurfalien <aurfalien at gmail.com> wrote: > 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. You can copy LVM snapshots easily to some other location with dd (= create image file of the snapshot LVM volume) that you can restore where ever you like using dd again. Regards, Peter