Hi John,
Basically, what I want to do is to run accurate backups without shutting down and restarting the VM. Is this possible? If it isn't, I think the only alternative is to make a script that shuts the vm down, copies it, restarts the vm then runs its compression and backup-over-ssh routine.
It's not possible in the general case to take a snapshot of the underlying image since as others have pointed out, it may not be consistent on disk since there are still data/metadata from the guest's filesystem that haven't made it out to disk.
Commercial hypervisors provide guest tools that allow a filesystem quiesce/sync that lock-steps with external snapshotting machinery.
However, one option that could be worth investigating is using ZFS in the guest with disk images backed by a zvol on the host. ZFS guarantees on-disk consistency, and a zvol provides instantaneous snapshots. Worst case is that some writes are not picked up at snapshot time, but that seems preferable to having to force a full sync in the guest.
later, Peter. _______________________________________________ freebsd-virtualization@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-virtualization To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-virtualization-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"
