[ale] Quick backups of Xen domU filesystems

[Richard Bronosky]

Jeff,
Here is something I put together a few years ago.
http://github.com/RichardBronosky/xenclone When I was the Internet
Systems Manager at the AJC, I did a lot of what you are wanting to do.

On Mon, Sep 27, 2010 at 4:20 PM, Jeff Hubbs <jhubbslist at att.net> 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.
>
> Because there will be a relatively small number of large and complex
> files in the source volume, I feel like rsync between two ordinary
> volumes would be little better than a simple copy and I'm looking for
> something that allows me to minimize how long the domU files in the
> source volume have to stay closed.  In fact, I would like to give the
> operators of the domUs specific times when their domUs will be shut
> down; if I'm depending on rsync/cp or something slow, in order to
> minimize downtime I'd have to stagger the shutdowns or run them
> serially, thereby getting wishy-washy on the *actual* downtime.
>
> So what modern options do I have for a sophisticated way of doing this?
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