Re: [open-vm-tools-devel] Next release

[Johannes K. <oj...@gm...>]

Hi,

Marcelo Vanzin schrieb:

> I think Elliot's comments are not 100% accurate. :-) The purpose of
> the driver is not really to make backups easier, but to make disk
> snapshots more consistent, by flushing all data that is cached in
> memory before taking a snapshot and preventing applications from
> writing to disk during the snapshot.

Ah, I see.

> So it's not really related to being able to mount vmdk files or
> anything like that - it's just a helper driver that runs in the
> guest, which is triggered by the snapshotting code in some VMware
> products.

OK.

> The way it works is the tools daemon (vmware-guestd) receives a
> command to "freeze" the filesystems in the VM, and it then tells the
> driver to do that. The driver flushes all caches and "freezes" the
> filesystems (meaning no writes are allowed until it's "thawed"). The
> VMware code in the host then takes a snapshot and notifies
> vmware-guestd that it's done, and then it tells the driver to "thaw"
> the filesystems, resuming normal operation.

Thanks for that explanation.

I was hoping this could be the right place to ask for the
mount-vmdks-feature on linux, but apparently it was not... ;-(

Thanks anyway,
OJ
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