how to back of virtual machine, for safety.

Gil@LQ · 12-04-2011, 01:03 PM

hi,

how to keep back of virtual machines, for safety. so that if any of the machine crashes i can use it. how many ways.

thank you very much.

acid_kewpie · 12-04-2011, 01:16 PM

by "back" you mean a backup, right? personally I just keep a copy of the virtual disks, but as you've not said anything about which virtualization solution you are using, we can't provide any real specifics.

digital-infinity · 12-04-2011, 01:16 PM

You must use a command line utility for your particular virtualization software to suspend your virtual host. Then you can just copy directories that contain virtual disks images...
After that you can resume your virtual host.

acid_kewpie · 12-04-2011, 02:17 PM

no, you don't necessarily need any specific tools at all, depends what you want to achieve.

digital-infinity · 12-05-2011, 05:37 AM

Actually sometimes we don't sometimes we do. We are keeping this discussion on very abstract level. We don't know what distro, what virtualization software the original post author is interested in and what he/she wants to achieve... ;-)

Gil@LQ · 12-05-2011, 08:24 AM

sorry for that, i'm mine is rhel6 64bit installed kvm-qemu. using virt-manger. i just want to back up the virtaul machies, if any one of the machine crashes, i can use the backup to revert back.

thank you very much.

digital-infinity · 12-06-2011, 03:23 AM

I am sorry Subbarao I think I misunderstood your first question. I see you want to build virtualization platform with some HA features. I don't have much experience in kvm-qemu .

Maybe you can do some incremental snapshots of virtual machines states and copy them to other hardware machines or you can use some SAN to share VM files between different hosts ? Of course you will not preserve network connections in this way, but it is hard to achieve that in any HA platform anyway.

Gil@LQ · 12-07-2011, 04:57 AM

it's k. thank you for your time. for time being i'm backing up the harddrives.

takcare thank u