Re: [libvirt-users] unattended cloning
----- Original Message -----
From: "Eric Blake" <eblake(a)redhat.com>
To: "Adam King" <kinga(a)sghs.org.uk>, "libvirt-users"
<libvirt-users(a)redhat.com>
Sent: Monday, 22 September, 2014 5:34:52 PM
Subject: Re: [libvirt-users] unattended cloning
On 09/16/2014 01:19 AM, Adam King wrote:
> Morning,
>
> I have a KVM guest running Win 2012 with MS SQL 2012.
> In order to provide a quick method of restoring the service should
> the live server die, we've decided to clone it to a preserved
> state.
> Ideally, this clone should also be kept up to date and cloning
> should be done on a regular basis.
>
> Is there any reason not to do unattended cloning? As in, when I
> leave on a Friday afternoon, start a script to clone the guest and
> auto start the live guest?
Sounds more like you are interested in snapshots than actually
cloning
your guest, where you could resume execution from the point of the
snapshot. And with external snapshots, it is indeed possible to
automate the periodic capture of a snapshot of a running guest; where
we
still lack polish is the steps for reverting back to the state in a
saved snapshot (it's doable, but requires effort outside of a simple
libvirt API call).
--
Eric Blake eblake redhat com +1-919-301-3266
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org
Thanks Eric & Kashyap.
Maybe I'm missing something with snapshots, my understanding is that if I did
something like this:
virsh snapshot-create-as VM snap1-vm --diskspec
vda,file=/export/vmimgs/snap1-testvm.qcow2
And then do the same to create snap2-vm, I will get 2 snapshots, where snap2 has snap1 as
its backing file.
OK, so doing a virsh blockpull can pull out snap1 but it looks to me as if cleaning up old
snapshots is quite tricky.
Thanks
Adam