Here is my weblog – Suzanna

I understand that the writer of this article is biased towards CITRIX and XEN (nothing wrong with that…) and seeks ways of hidding VMWARE’s superiority from his reader’s eyes – however, there are plenty of other ways to promote XEN’s advantages that falsely accuse its competitors.

Panos Tsapralis.

Each VM uses the same Centos Linux OS and its LVM partition appears as a SCSI disk drive with two partitions, a root partition and a swap partition. All VM’s are identical except for the size of the root partition and the services they run. We have a master VM in a LVM partition that is used as a template. Creating a new VM is a matter of dd’ing the master VM’s LVM partition to the new VM’s LVM partition, then using kpartx and resize2fs to adjust the size of the VM’s root and swap partitions as needed. Bacula (www.bacula.org) is installed on each VM and they are backed up as if they were real machines. Restore is simply dd’ing the master template to the VM’s LVM partition, starting the VM, adjusting a couple of lines in its Bacula config, and running the Bacula restore job from the Bacula director host.

The advantages of this method are:
– All VMs are backed up live
– Only the needed services and data on the VM need be backed up
– The master VM is never running, so is backed up along with the
host it resides on in a straight forward manner
– By setting up a different master VM, the VMs can be migrated to
a different virtualization environment or even a real machine,
so the backups are virtualization agnostic.
– Backups for both VMs and real machines are centrally organized
by Bacula.
– Critical service VMs are running on a heartbeat HA cluster with
DRBD mirroring their LVM partitions across two different hosts.
This method allows backing up the VM independent of which host
it happens to be running on.

I’m not biased toward Citrix and VMware. I just used those two for comparison based on market share–being the two most widely used Enterprise-level virtualization solutions.

When I said “no direct method” I was referring to the fact that you have to power off the VM to make the clone.

Thanks. These posts are not meant to be in-depth technical articles but are instead, blogicles. And, as offered in the article, if you’re using VMware Server, you have snapshots, file-level backup, and so on. There are multiple examples of what you can use.

As far as strategies that others use, they are as varied as opinions on the economy and politics. ;-)

I will tell you this though: If you’re using VMware Server, either you don’t have a lot of VMs or you need something free. VMware Server is NOT an Enterprise solution–it is meant to be a free, introductory solution to VMware virtualization. There’s nothing wrong with VMware Server but just realize that it’s not VMware ESX or Xen.