Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 590486
KVM backup scripts for file based and LVM
Last modified: 2013-01-09 17:33:51 EST
Fedora and RHEL doesn't have any back up programs for KVM or Xen guests. Anyone running important guests wants to have back ups frequently. These two scripts does exactly that. Backup Xen virtual machines with LVM snapshots and ftplicity/duplicity http://maff.ailoo.net/2009/07/backup-xen-virtual-machines-lvm-snapshots-ftplicity-duplicity/ backing up your xen domains http://www.johnandcailin.com/blog/john/backing-your-xen-domains rsnapshot also have LVM features, so perhaps that could also be useful.
This bug appears to have been reported against 'rawhide' during the Fedora 14 development cycle. Changing version to '14'. More information and reason for this action is here: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/HouseKeeping
Here is a link to some hints about using LVM snapshots to back up KVM. http://edoceo.com/liber/kvm-lvm
Engineering has developed a utility called virt-backup and it's available at: http://people.redhat.com/minovotn/virt-backup/RHEL-5-RPMS/ There are RPM packages for RHEL-5 platform that supports both LZMA and that doesn't support LZMA (depending on directory you're about to download them from). This is test build and is not production ready. Kindly download and test the tool in your test environment and provide us the feed back. Details on using the tool, Version: 0.0.1 Limitations: - Only the image files can be backed up, no support for backing up physical devices (partitions, LVM volumes etc.) yet - Users have have libvirt installed, tested with both Xen and KVM hypervisors and working fine - For LZMA version of library, user must have liblzma (from xz package) installed - No GUI support, only terminal/shell access Features: - Can backup and restore all the guests supported by libvirt - You can pass hypervisor URI (like xen:/// or qemu:///system etc.) when using the '-u' parameter on the command-line - automatically probes for hypervisor if nothing is defined - Optionally can backup images for running (active) guests (not recommended because of possible inconsistency in the image file!) - Optionally can enable/disable LZMA compression of backed up guests (LZMA version only) - enabled by default. - Optionally you can define the names of the guests to be backed up (using comma-separated names) Usage: 1) to backup guests (all that are not running) using a default probed hypervisor with default settings of LZMA (i.e. enabled when compiled): # virt-backup backup -l pathToStoreBackupGuestImages 2) to backup 2 guest (named guest1 and guest2): # virt-backup backup -l pathToStoreBackupGuestImages -d guest1,guest2 3) to restore the guest images from source path (path with the backed up images and XML files) to destination path: virt-backup restore -l sourcePath -p destinationPath Note: Do *not* edit/delete the XML files on the path with backed up images. There are libvirt XML configuration files for the guests and also one file containing information about the original guest image sizes including the selinux context to be restored (may be null if selinux is not used at all and labelling was not done yet) and domain name the image belongs to.
The proper way to get these tools into fedora is to package them and submit a package review. See https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackageMaintainers/Join Either way, the KVM package was merged with the qemu package, so any future issues should be filed against the 'qemu' component.