[BackupPC-users] New plugin for the backup of LVM partitions (e.g. XEN vm)

[Alberto E. <al...@bi...>]

Hi,
i'd like to announce the relase of a plugin for the backup of LVM partitions.
I developed this scripts to handle the backup of my virtual servers.

This is an extract of the documentation:

    While doing backups of virtual servers, there are typically two critical
    requirements:

    1. to have almost zero downtime for the services running on the virtual
       machine (suppose that the machine is a web server or a database server);
    2. the backup must be done syncing the file system in a consistent status;
       a typical example is a database server that must be copied when the processes
       are idle, the cache is flushed and there is no stale data around.

    These two requirements are conflicting: stopping the critical processes for
    the time required by the backup is likely to cause a long downtime of the
    services.

    This BackupPC add-on helps you in solving this problem, by leveraging on the
    snapshot features of LVM. The scripting framework will quickly take a snapshot
    of the virtual machines in idle status and, while the services become up
    again, the backup system can take a backup of the frozen snapshot system
    safely.

    At the end of the process we will have a backup of any virtual machine with a
    service downtime of the order of few seconds.

I have been used this system over the past years so i can say that it works
pretty well for my xen virtual machines.

I'm waiting for the authorization to publish the documentation in the backuppc
wiki; for now you can find all the informations about this product here:

    http://www.biodec.com/tools/software/backuppc-lvm


Kind regards.
Alberto Eusebi