I am always for using the right tool for the job. For me, this is
ESXpress http://www.phdvirtual.com .
brian-
Hydro Meteor wrote:
> Hello all --
>
> As the world continues to ramp up into the use of virtual machine
> systems more and more, its becoming quite an interesting world to live
> in with regard to storage systems and backups of these virtual machine
> files. The main virtual machine systems such as those by VMWare (I.e.,
> VMWare Fusion that runs on Mac OS X which is similar if I'm not
> mistaken to VMWare Workstation) offer useful options such as snapshots
> and rollbacks.
>
> One of the consequences of having a lot of virtual machine snapshots
> around on a file system is that its easy for these virtual machine
> *image* files on the host OS's filesystem to become quite large
> relatively speaking (it would be easy to have multiple virtual
> machines for example whose file sizes on the host OS's filesystem are
> well into the multiple Gigabytes). I have noticed that if one merely
> boots up a virtual machine, its (relatively large) *image* file will
> change (even if the actual changes within the virtual machine were
> scant).
>
> Given t
> his context and Bacula, from a file system standpoint, backing up
> differentials or incrementals of these large image files on a regular
> basis could easily start to become problematic, perhaps not so much
> with respect to Bacula Volumes (whether tape, optical disc, hard
> drive, etc. because one might argue that storage is cheap and Kryder's
> Law [1] marches on), but much more so is the issue of network
> bandwidth (where distributed backups are leveraged, which is one of
> Bacula's greatest strengths) -- moving gigabyte-scale files can be a
> problem. Even Amazon, which sells their S3 storage service, has
> recently offered a beta of their new AWS Import/Export service ("ship
> us that disk!"):
>
> http://aws.amazon.com/importexport/
>
> http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2009/05/send-us-that-data.html
>
> *AWS Import/Export: Ship Us That Disk!*
>
> Since station wagons and tapes are both on the verge of
> obsolescence, others have updated this nugget of wisdom to
> reference DVDs and Boeing 747s.
> Hard drives are getting bigger more rapidly than internet
> connections are getting faster. It is now relatively easy to
> create a collection of data so large that it cannot be uploaded to
> offsite storage (e.g. Amazon S3) in a reasonable amount of time.
> Media files, corporate backups, data collected from scientific
> experiments, and potential AWS Public Data Sets are now at this
> point. Our customers in the scientific space routinely create
> terabyte data sets from individual experiments.
>
>
> This brings me to a question which is, what about a future version of
> Bacula that would be able to perform block level backups of
> differentials and incrementals? That way, if say a 4 GB file
> (representing a virtual machine for example) had only a small number
> of disk level blocks that changed, only those blocks would need to be
> backed up relative to an initial Full backup? I imagine one argument
> might be to just install Bacula on every virtual machine ever created,
> but that's not practical. Seeing that Amazon is trying to solve the
> problem of backups and bandwidth, it strikes me as if Bacula could
> help to scratch this itch as well?
>
> Cheers,
>
> -hydro
>
> [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Kryder
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> OpenSolaris 2009.06 is a cutting edge operating system for enterprises
> looking to deploy the next generation of Solaris that includes the latest
> innovations from Sun and the OpenSource community. Download a copy and
> enjoy capabilities such as Networking, Storage and Virtualization.
> Go to: http://p.sf.net/sfu/opensolaris-get
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OpenSolaris 2009.06 is a cutting edge operating system for enterprises
looking to deploy the next generation of Solaris that includes the latest
innovations from Sun and the OpenSource community. Download a copy and
enjoy capabilities such as Networking, Storage and Virtualization.
Go to: http://p.sf.net/sfu/opensolaris-get
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