Francis Dipietromaria WebLog

One of the most important new features of XenServer 5.5 is the ability to make and manage snapshots of virtual machines regardless of the type of storage repository. This obviously has an important impact on backup procedures.

A little 'time ago, I published a simple bash script to run on XenServer (5.0) to turn off and make the export of virtual machines. This type of solution is very simple, has the obvious disadvantages in that it is necessary to take off the VM all the time needed for backup!

With XenServer 5.5, it becomes much easier: you can create a snapshot and backup of the snapshot.

The idea has been materialized by Jeremy Tirrel community on the Citrix blog and subsequently amended by Roberto Cespa. The basic idea is as follows: create a snapshot, make the snapshot a VM, make exports a file system (NFS), and delete VM snapshots. Remains the problem of consistency of the snapshot, a problem mitigated with the installation of XenServer Windows VSS provider that allow you to take advantage of Windows Shadow Copy Services.

I remind you, however, that "XenServer Windows VSS provider" must be installed manually after installing XenTools, as reported in the XenServer Virtual Machine Installation Guide (see page 11).

For more information:

• 0 downtime snapshot based backup XenServer 5.5 script by Jeremy Tirrel
• Backing up Xen virtual machines without interruption Roberto Cespa

Other articles on similar topics:

1. Backup with Deduplication of virtual machines on XenServer with QuorumSoft ALIKI
2. Backup of VM on Citrix XenServer: yet another script
3. Hot backup of virtual machines on Microsoft Hyper-V
4. Backup VMs on XenServer
5. Citrix XenServer Virtual Machine Backup white paper
6. Migrate virtual machines from xend Xen Cloud Platform
7. PHD Virtual Backup for XenServer releases. Soon the version for Hyper-V