Comparing HA-Lizard and XenServer HA

Dashrender

@scottalanmiller said:

@DustinB3403 said:

No, it is strictly a running state backup tool. It does however cleanup after it's self. Removing the Snapshot from Xen's local storage, and will remove old backup's after the default of 4. (this default can be changed)

If you store images on a system with block-level dedupe it will act much like an incremental.

It kicks the VM offline to perform a snapshot, so if you're willing to take your VM's down for that given length of time on schedule every so often I suppose it could.

Seems like overkill to me.

Say what? it shuts the VM down?

So much for years of uptime.

DustinB3403

Years of uptime, as awesome as it sounds doesn't really work.

It sets the VM to a suspend state while it build the backup file. (At least this is what NAUBackup does).

So technically speaking your Uptime counter should still continue, as far as the VM knows.

Dashrender

@DustinB3403 said:

Years of uptime, as awesome as it sounds doesn't really work.

It sets the VM to a suspend state while it build the backup file. (At least this is what NAUBackup does).

So technically speaking your Uptime counter should still continue, as far as the VM knows.

I take it you can't use that on things like SQL and Exchange then?

DustinB3403

I haven't had anything to try yet that is heavily used. We have our Asset management system which is built on a SQL Database, and that gets backed up weekly without issue.

But there are only 2-4 people accessing the database at a time, at the most.

dafyre

I was under the impression that there was only a blip in the machine's activity as the snapshot was taken (this usually doesn't take but a second or two, right?).

DustinB3403

Just testing now, it takes maybe 3-5 seconds to run per VM in our environment.

DustinB3403

And that is only the Snapshot portion, migrating it off host obviously takes a bit of time.

Dashrender

@DustinB3403 said:

And that is only the Snapshot portion, migrating it off host obviously takes a bit of time.

Sure, but other than using some resources shouldn't really be noticed by the VMs themselves.

dafyre

@DustinB3403 After the snapshots are complete, the VMs should go back to running.

DustinB3403

@dafyre Correct they do.

Immediately after those first few seconds. The data transfer off host takes the longest amount of time to complete.

I have 4 VM's that we backup (care about) that use 696GB of data, so the transfer time takes a bit.

dafyre

@DustinB3403 How much does that affect the performance of the VMs that are running while your backups are being copied off?

DustinB3403

I've never monitored them.

The work is being done by Dom0, not the VM.

And with the resources being statically assigned I can't imagine that there is much of a hit to the performance of the VM's them self.