It will be safer when it is shutdown. That's what I was intending. Right now, I'm just asking about local storage (from a hard drive that the host is on, where the original image is stored, to an external USB hard drive). I tried this out, and it seemed to work fine. I would just copy the backed up disk image to /var/lib/libvirt/images and edit the host's xml file to reflect the new storage location, and bring it up in virt manager.
I would definitely use backup software from within the guest for primary back ups, I was just trying to find another avenue as well by utilizing the guest vm's inherent portability of it just being a couple of files that constitute the vm. I did try this with virt-clone, and it worked out well, since the intent was to backup the whole guest image. -Kenny On Wed, Feb 2, 2011 at 8:30 AM, Richard W.M. Jones <rjo...@redhat.com> wrote: > On Tue, Feb 01, 2011 at 09:46:25AM -0500, Kenneth Armstrong wrote: >> I finally have a non-rhev related question. >> >> Would this suffice to back up a virtual machine to external media, >> that could be later imported into virt-manager to run on another >> system? >> >> run: >> virt-clone (back up the disk image to external media) >> virsh dumpxml vm > /backup/media/vm.xml >> >> Or is this not going to work? > > I assume also from the question that this is really about copying > guests from one host to another, perhaps for DR? If instead what you > really want to do is take regular backups, then the recommended > solution is to install your favourite backup software inside the guest > and back it up like a regular machine. > > But assuming this is about copying and DR ... > > It depends on whether the guest is running, and also on how > 'virt-clone' performs the copy of the disk image. To be honest I > wouldn't bother with 'virt-clone'; it is a distraction. Look at the > disk images directly. > > What format are the disk images? (raw, qcow2, ...) > > Are they files, LVs, partitions, iSCSI LUNs, other ...? > > Can your storage system take snapshots? > > Do you want this to work when the VM is live, or will the VM be shut down? > > Rich. > > -- > Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones > virt-top is 'top' for virtual machines. Tiny program with many > powerful monitoring features, net stats, disk stats, logging, etc. > http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-top > _______________________________________________ virt-tools-list mailing list virt-tools-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/virt-tools-list