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?

From: "Eric Blake" <eblake(a)redhat.com&gt; To: "Adam King" <kinga(a)sghs.org.uk&gt;, "libvirt-users" <libvirt-users(a)redhat.com&gt; 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