[Xen-users] Backup strategy

[Andy Smith <andy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Until recently I was backing up all my domUs using a strategy based
on LVM snapshots.  All my disk block devices are provided by LVM so
I was just regularly mounting a snapshot in dom0 and then using
rsnapshot (based on rsync) to take backups without fear of changing
database files etc.

This was nice because it meant that I didn't have to do anything in
each domU.  I didn't have to arrange for access to the domU, or worry
about what was running in the domU that could screw up my backups.

Unfortunately I have had to stop using LVM snapshots.  It seems
since I got to the point of having quite a few snapshots active,
there are stability issues.  In the last two months, on mounting a
snapshot LV the mount command has just hung and so have all accesses
to the LV that the snapshot is being made from.  That kills a domU
and prevents it from being started again.  To get out of that I've
had to reboot dom0.

So for a while now I've been running without any snapshots mounted,
and without doing any backups.  I was wondering what other people do
about backing up their domUs.

Of course I could treat them as separate boxes and configure backup
software on each, but I was hoping that what with all the block
devices coming from dom0 anyway that there would be a good way to
access them read-only there in one place.  Can any of the cluster
filesystems, or NDB flavours help with this?

Thanks,
Andy

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