I don't use xenserver but my generic advice as a strategy would be to backup
the contents of the VMs rather than the raw virtual disks.
Effetively treating the guests as if they were physical systems. The raw
virtual disk files will be large but also non-unique so will cost a lot more
in storage space in your backups and potentially take a lot more time to
backup. Backing up the files contained within the VMs should save space
with BackupPC in taking full advantage of single instance storage of repeated
files in your pool common to many users or host systems.
Invariably it is the data rather than an operating system that is usually most
important to keep, so you may choose to only keep a subset within each VM
of the unique data and configs etc. However it may be no harm to include a
single backup of a "template" of your base operating system of the VM to which
you may subsequently restore data files to, particularly if your guest OS are
heavily customised and rebuilds are complex or time consuming
to recreate from scratch.
That may aid a quicker recovery situation and gives you a hypervisor and
potentially OS agnostic recovery option route should you need it compared
to say taking VM system state snapshots and backing those up for example.
G.
_____________________________________
Graham Smith
Technical Officer
Department of Computing
Institute of Technology Tallaght
Tallaght
Dublin 24
Ireland
From: Elias Pereira [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: 04 July 2016 02:30
To: General list for user discussion questions and support
<[email protected]>
Subject: [BackupPC-users] Backup of virtual machines
Hello guys,
What the best way to backup VMs from xenserver?
Thanks in advance!
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