BackUp device for local or colo storage
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@DustinB3403 said:
Scott mentioned that it's possible to restore the hardware with SC as well. Is this an additional process, or something that is just performed automatically?
You would only backup the files in that case. We are talking the Dom0 here. Just the files, not the full VM.
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I am researching a good way to handle that.
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@StrongBad said:
@DustinB3403 said:
Scott mentioned that it's possible to restore the hardware with SC as well. Is this an additional process, or something that is just performed automatically?
You would only backup the files in that case. We are talking the Dom0 here. Just the files, not the full VM.
Yes, just the files. XenServer's Dom0 is going to be "identical" each time so no point in backing that up in its entirety.
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Don't forget, as well, that you would generally do something like have XenServer on a USB stick or SD card and then you could take an image of the full thing once in a while for failover. But that is done offline so would be problematic for recent VM configurations.
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@StrongBad ok but backing up Dom0 from Xenserver is different from what I'm thinking.
Just for an example. I need to rebuild a VM, besides adding the CPU and Memory, and Boot media could I skip the step of adding a vDisk and let storage craft add that.
Or must I add the vDisk matching what was in the original VM?
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@DustinB3403 it is the Xen config on Dom0 that would have that information.
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Why wouldn't SC at the guest level contain the virtual hardware information?
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@DustinB3403 said:
Just for an example. I need to rebuild a VM, besides adding the CPU and Memory, and Boot media could I skip the step of adding a vDisk and let storage craft add that.
Or must I add the vDisk matching what was in the original VM?
The virtual disk configuration is part of the information on XenServer and not something that any OS level tool, like StorageCraft, could ever access. It's part of the hardware. If you think of it from SC's perspective, that would be like having SC physically install a new RAID array for you. It can't do that. You need to provide the hardware onto which SC will do the restore.
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@DustinB3403 said:
Why wouldn't SC at the guest level contain the virtual hardware information?
Because the guest doesn't have that information. That's the platform level.
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So basically, using SC for this, which does seem like a better option.
But it means that each VM must be well documented, which I suspect will be difficult for "people" to maintain.
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@DustinB3403 said:
So basically, using SC for this, which does seem like a better option.
But it means that each VM must be well documented, which I suspect will be difficult for "people" to maintain.
Documentation would be quite important. Same as if you had to replace failed hardware. Although the hardware does not have to be identical.
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Documentation is really the key is what it comes down too.
Not a hard answer. Just something that needs to be well maintained.
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I have no looked into this before, does XenServer store the actual configuration of the clients in the /var/xapi database folder on the Dom0?
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@StrongBad haha... documentation... all of that which I'm trying to sort here, and actually get written at work....
Yeah... documentation.... it's gotta start somewhere. keeping it current is the difficult part for most people.
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Info here on how to backup and restore the Dom0 metadata.
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Some good info here too...
http://tecadmin.net/backup-vms-metadata-in-citrix-xenserver/
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I have one more question.
What if we wanted to "expand a file server to a larger vDISk to the file share partition.
Or would I expand the drive from Xencenter, reboot, and expand?
Edit: I guess what I mean, which way is the preferred method to expanding a partition.
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What OS and filesystem are you expanding?
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Server 2008 is our current file server so I'm just curious what the process would be.
In XenCenter, I can simply go to the VM vDISK (with the vm off) and expand the drive. Boot up and then go into disk manager and expand.
Would it be the same process using SC. I'm assuming it would have to be.
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Since the hardware is stored at the hypervisor level, right?
