Backing up virtual machines while powered on is probably not a great
idea, but there are good alternatives:
- In your ClientRunBeforeJob script, power down the VM, and power it
back up after the backup is done. Alternatively, suspend and resume the VM.
I used to take this approach in my pre-bacula days, so I can't give you
the exact way to make it work with bacula.
I used the vmware-cmd script several times:
vmware-cmd -l
produces a list of all registered virtual machines. Each line can act as
<machinename> in the following scripts.
vmware-cmd <machinename> getstate
returns the current state of the VM. I used this to determine whether I
need to stop, and later to restart, the VM
vmware-cmd <machinename> stop soft
vmware-cmd <machinename> start
will stop and start the virtual machines, respectively. The "soft"
keyword will cause a graceful shutdown; it requires the VMWare Tools to
be installed in the VM.
Taking it all together, my script looked something like this - you will
need to rewrite it quite a bit to split it into the ClientRunBeforeJob
and ClientRunAfterJob scripts.
#!/bin/bash
vmware-cmd -l | while read vmname
do
machinestate=$(vmware-cmd "$vmname" getstate -q)
if [ $machinestate -ne 0 ]
then
vmware-cmd "$vmname" stop soft
fi
# do the backup here
if [ $machinestate -ne 0 ]
then
vmware-cmd "$vmname" start
fi
done
- Use LVM snapshots. I would still suggest suspending the VM for a few
seconds while taking the snapshot.
Timo Neuvonen wrote:
> This isn't excatly a Bacula-related issue, but has anyone experiences how
> consistent bacups can be achieved if I back up a linux host running a VMware
> Server with some of the virtual machines "powered on"? Will the result be
> something total garbage, or something that can reasonably succesfully be
> restored too? Though a virtual machine would be on, there would be no
> significant user activity during the backup run.
>
> Of course, this would lead to making always full backups, since a whole
> virtual machine is basically just a single file (or very few huge files).
> But I wouldn't like to install a client to each of the virtual machines
> separately, especially since they all won't be powered up at all the times.
> This is mostly about occasionally backing up the whole set of system files
> in all the virtual machines, there would be only minimal amount of any user
> data, since it would be actually a workstation with 2-3 different virtual
> machines with different operating systems each, and users should keep the
> actual data elsewhere on a "real" server.
>
>
> Then, this is more like a Bacula thing: are there any "big" issues specific
> to current Bacula clients in 64-bit RHEL5/CentOS5 systems running on
> an Intel CPU (Core 2 etc, but not Xeon)?
> Should I use i386 client in such an environment, or x86_64 which has a
> remark "AMD architecture" on Sourceforge downloads?
>
>
> Regards,
> Timo
>
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