Hi, On Apr 27, 2012, at 4:23 AM, Peter Peltonen wrote: > 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. After some experiment with qcow vs raw, I think raw is more stable and a tad fatser even if you pre allocate the metadata for your qcow images. So, I will opt for LVMs. Do you have a best practice in terms of ratio of snapshot to live FS? In other words, should my LVM snapshot partition be 1:1 with my live FS size or 2/3 the size of bigger? This will be based off a Raid 1 system. - aurf