Hi,
This may be a stupid request and potentially covered at some point - I did
find a wiki entry relating to the broad concept here
<http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/Proposal:_Disk_import/export>.
Basically I want to be able to selectively snapshot different aspects of a
VM. We have a lot of machines running off a small OS disk, with larger data
disks. I want to be able to do a snapshot of the OS disk selectively, which
I can do with the API and the exposing mechanism from the wiki. This is
because the data on the larger disks is usually part of a separate backup
process and can be recovered with different methods - also most of the SR's
that we run these VMs on are not really large enough to be able to snapshot
all of the disks. However, if I do it this way it means that I also open
myself up to having potentially unrestorable machine images.
What I am wondering is if there is a way of performing a memory only
snapshot? My strategy would be that I pause a vm, snapshot the OS disk,
then dump the memory somehow, unpause the VM and then sync the snapshots to
a backup unit. Given that I can perform a disk and memory snapshot, I
wouldn't have thought this would be too out of the question?
Please feel free to point out that what I'm asking for is completely stupid
- I freely admit I haven't done a giant amount of research on this point.
Thanks
Jon
This may be a stupid request and potentially covered at some point - I did
find a wiki entry relating to the broad concept here
<http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/Proposal:_Disk_import/export>.
Basically I want to be able to selectively snapshot different aspects of a
VM. We have a lot of machines running off a small OS disk, with larger data
disks. I want to be able to do a snapshot of the OS disk selectively, which
I can do with the API and the exposing mechanism from the wiki. This is
because the data on the larger disks is usually part of a separate backup
process and can be recovered with different methods - also most of the SR's
that we run these VMs on are not really large enough to be able to snapshot
all of the disks. However, if I do it this way it means that I also open
myself up to having potentially unrestorable machine images.
What I am wondering is if there is a way of performing a memory only
snapshot? My strategy would be that I pause a vm, snapshot the OS disk,
then dump the memory somehow, unpause the VM and then sync the snapshots to
a backup unit. Given that I can perform a disk and memory snapshot, I
wouldn't have thought this would be too out of the question?
Please feel free to point out that what I'm asking for is completely stupid
- I freely admit I haven't done a giant amount of research on this point.
Thanks
Jon