Open Stack

Backing up guests can be tricky. You could use cinder backups or snapshots, but you may hit consistency issues if you are not freezing IO.

Since you are using Ceph, you can take snapshots of the RBDs from Ceph too, but that's not a true backup. Backing up from Ceph to another location is challenging since the data is distributed and (typically) in raw format; this results in having to backup the raw disk image itself. This will chew up lots of disk space, unless your backup storage target has de-dupe/compression/etc.

Having to do backups isn't very cloudy, but I don't think there is a single operator that isn't stuck with a bunch of guests imported from VMWare, so we all probably have to figure this one out. The best approach I've found so far, if you want actual backups, it to use a backup solution that runs inside of the guest.

I'm looking forward to other replies to this thread, this is an ongoing issue for me too.


-----Original Message-----
From: Brendan Johnson [mailto:bjohnson at paragusit.com] 
Sent: Monday, June 29, 2015 10:53 AM
To: openstack-operators at lists.openstack.org
Subject: [Openstack-operators] Image Based Backups

What are people using to perform image based backups of Windows and Linux VMs in OpenStack?  I am using KVM as the hypervisor, Ceph for block storage and Swift for object storage.  I know Cinder can backup volumes that are not in use (at least in Juno, that may have changed in Kilo).   I am looking for an image backup solution that allow the backup of online KVM VMs.  Integration with OpenStack would be nice but isn't a must.

Thanks,

Brendan Johnson


   





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