[ale] Quick backups of Xen domU filesystems

[Brian Pitts]

On 09/27/2010 04:20 PM, Jeff Hubbs wrote:
>   I'm setting up a Xen server for hosting of virtualized internet-facing 
> servers and I'm looking for a way to make quick backups of the largish 
> domU filesystem files on the physical host.
> 
> Right now I've got an extendable LVM2 logical volume (now 32GiB in size) 
> set up specifically for holding these files and I expect each one to be 
> at least a few GiB in size.  I know that LVM2 has some sort of 
> snapshotting mechanism available but I'm not sure if it really does what 
> I want...I'm envisioning some sort of write-twice filesystem or 
> abstraction such that if the source volume is made stable (i.e., all 
> domUs are stopped and all files are closed), the snapshot copy can be 
> very quickly finalized and frozen so that the source volume can be put 
> back in service right away while tape backups can be made from the 
> snapshot.

This is exactly what you can do this with lvm snapshots.

-- 
All the best,
Brian Pitts