Unless you're coordinating with the OS, then taking a VMware snapshot and copying it is equivalent to pulling the power plug on a server. Will it power back up without corruption? 99.9% of the time, yes. Has anyone who has been in the biz for a while had a scenario where powercycling a box caused a corrupted OS disk? I'd say so.
The SAFE thing to do is to make sure that no app is writing to the filesystem while you're snapping it. IMHO, Oracle/Exchange/SQL Server should not be running or in backup mode if you're going to make a snapshot at the virtual console level. Powering the system down obviously meets that requirement. --- W. Curtis Preston Backup Blog @ www.backupcentral.com VP Data Protection, GlassHouse Technologies > -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > On Behalf Of Steven > Sent: Wednesday, February 27, 2008 9:20 AM > To: amanda-users@amanda.org > Subject: Re: Backing up VMware-VMs > > Stefan G. Weichinger wrote: > > Because we are fearing problems? > > > >> We do a vm snapshot to a backup server. Amanda backs up the snapshot > >> from the backup server. > >> > > > > And it is reliable? > > > We've never had a problem restoring machines. We often take a snapshot > of a production machine and turn it into a development machine. > > By taking a snapshot everything is frozen as is. So what can you lose? > Any program running on the machine will continue to run once the machine > is back on. So the only thing you could lose is if data was coming from > a remote host. But if you're shutting down, you'll lose that > information anyways. > > I guess if you had a program which was timing sensitive, it might not > like being suspended. I don't know of any like that, and it should be > easy to test. > > VMware's entire backup offerings center around snapshots. Rarely a > snapshot will fail, but it doesn't effect the running vm. Even more > rarely the running vm will get stuck and needs to be power cycled just > like a normal server locking up. > > I agree, it's more elegant and also faster, but the VMs there are pretty > > important, so the first draft is to stop and start them. > > > > How does your routine look like? > > > The command is different on different versions of VMware. On esx 2.5 its: > > mount /mnt/vmimages #In fstab its a remote share - some people save to a > local partition but we don't have the space. > /usr/sbin/vmsnap.pl -f rl -c /home/vmware/cyrus/cyrus.vmx -d > /mnt/vmimages -l #This is a script from vmware, uses the perl api. One > esx 3 this line is different. > umount /mnt/vmimages > > Then on that remote server the mount point is /files/vmimages/ The > snapshot script creates a directory for the image being backed up. So > in the amanda server I create a DLE for /files/vmimages/cyrus Amanda > is scheduled to run a couple hours after the snapshots run. > > I don't automatically add things under /files/vmimages to the disklist, > but I do have a script which greps the disklist to and tells me if > something isn't being backed up.
