we are looking for a backup solution for our xen servers that meets the following requirements:
makes backups while machines are running
has easy to use disaster recovery without depending on complex infrastructure in case of a disaster
can backup all kinds of linux and windows machines
sends some kind of message if something is not working. We dont want to monitor everything manually
We tried Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 virtual edition but it is not compatible with linux vms. Bacula does not seem to have good disaster recovery, as far as we know.
My question:
What are good backup solutions for our requirements?
Thanks advance for your answers.
Cheers
Arne
moved to https://serverfault.com/questions/230062/good-backup-solution-for-xen-virtual-machines
Related
In my company we are deciding to move part of our backups to the cloud, and in particular, as the title suggests, we have configured wasabi backup.
The first urgency is to move the backups to the proxmox inside the company on wasabi, but looking on the documentation and online I can't find a way to move the backups from the proxmox to wasabi.
Do you have any suggestions or advice?
We're looking to accomplish something similar with Proxmox and Wasabi. After some digging this afternoon, the most mature way of doing this would be to use Veeam with Agent Backup. Veeam does not officially support the Proxmox kernel, explained by staff here, and it doesn't seem like they have any intention of doing so. This means you cannot back up the VM/CTs from the hypervisor level (reliably). But, it seems that you can leverage the Agent Backup instead, and use the VBS (Veeam Backup Server) to push incremental backups to Wasabi. I use Veeam and Wasabi together with some clientele on ESXi for a 3-2-1 backup scheme with Agent Backups, works great. This is the approach we're going to take with Proxmox as well. Although it's more expensive than some cheap workaround, this backup method scales very well considering you can use VEM to manage other VBSs.
EDIT: Here's a few links to Veeam resources to check out:
Veeam Agent Backup (Linux version, but they make a Windows and Mac agent too.)
General VBR Resource Page
I have a Python / REDIS service running on my desk that I want to move to my Blue-Domino-hosted site. I've got Python available on the server, but not REDIS. They don't give me root access to my Debian VM so I can't git, extract, and install myself from a Unix prompt.
Their tech support might do the install for me, but they need me to point them to server requirements, which I don't see on the REDIS download page.
I could probably FTP binaries to the site if they were available, but that's dicey.
Has anyone dealt with this?
Installing Redis is actually quite easy, from source. It doesn't have any dependencies, so just download the tarball, unzip it, and follow the install instructions. I'm always afraid of doing that sort of stuff, but with Redis it really was a breeze. If you don't dare to do it their tech support should be able to do it.
If it is Intel/AMD server, you can compile the Redis somewhere (32 bit version for example), and upload it as binary. Then start it with Python. I did this myself couples weeks ago.
For port you will need to use something over 1000. I don't recommend to use default port. Remember to change LogLevel too. Daemonize works well as non-root too.
Some servers blocks all external ports, so you will not be able to connect to Redis from outside, but this will be a problem only if you connect from different machine. For same machine should be OK, since is "internal".
However, I am unsure how hosting administrator will react when he sees the process running :) I personally will kill it immediately.
There is other option as well - check service like Redis4you.com . But their free account is small, you probably will need to spend some money for more RAM.
Is your hosting provider looking for a minimum set of system requirements for running Redis? This is indeed not listed on the Redis website. Probably because there aren't many exotic requirements. Also it depends a lot on your use case. Basically what you need to run Redis is:
Operating system: Unix like, Linux is recommended (one reason to favor Linux I've heard of is the performance of its TCP/IP stack)
Tools: GCC, make, (git).
Memory: lots (no seriously this depends on your use case, but because Redis keeps everything in-memory you need a least more RAM than the size of your dataset).
Disk: disk access for making snapshots.
The problem seems to be dealing with something non-traditional with my BlueDomino hosting. Since this project is a new venture, I think the best course for me is to rent a small Linux VM from rackspace and forget about the BD hosting.
Is it possible having virtual machines in the cloud, install visual studio there, and making developers using the 'cloud' to do day-to-day programming work? Is the cost going to be too high? Is the speed going to be too slow?
Where can I find statistics or numbers to convince people?
I like using remote virtual machines to run development servers, but I don't like using my IDE on a remote server. The latency is noticeable. If you're without an internet connection you can't work. My happy compromise is to have a dev server available (EC2) and sync it with my laptop via git.
It is completely possible to do this, using a service like Rackspace you can set up a fairly powerful windows server for as little as $60 a month:
http://www.rackspacecloud.com/cloud_hosting_products/servers/pricing
In my experience using Remote Desktop to log into a Rackspace Windows Cloud Server has been snappy and quick (of course a lot of that depends on the strength of your internet connection). The process of standing up the server is lighting fast, backing it up is even easier, and it can be easily resized down the line if you need more storage/bandwidth.
These days I don't understand why a small to mid sized organization would actually waste capital on server hardware.
Evan
I'm looking for a VM management solution that will allow me to easily maintain VMs in a single repository accessible on the corporate intranet.
I'm currently looking into VMware's vCenter, HP's Manager, Microsoft's VM Manager. vCenter seems to require an ESX server, which I'm not very happy about. I haven't looked into others yet.
But can anyone suggest a good/simple solution to this? I'm looking for a bit more than just SAN space for the VMs, but at the same time I don't want to run a whole ESX server for this. Any ideas, suggestions?
Is there a reason you're not wanting an ESX Server?
vCenter does require an ESX server, but you can always run ESXi, which would run locally and can be managed by vCenter... and best of all, ESXi is free!
http://www.vmware.com/products/esxi/
Otherwise, you can also go with VMware Server http://www.vmware.com/products/server/
I would definitely recommend ESXi
Whether you were to go with VMware ESXi (the free edition of ESX) or the full-blown ESX is a business and maintainability decision.
Personally, the cost of the license for ESX to ensure I had the administrative tools, support, and maintenance is worth it in a corporate environment.
If it were my personal computer collection, then I'd go with ESXi because I don't have a reason to need the support and admin tools provided with a full ESX license.
The $2640 cost for a license to also get support for 3 years is pretty small in my book.
(http://store.vmware.com/servlet/ControllerServlet?Action=DisplayPage&Env=BASE&Locale=en_US&SiteID=vmware&id=ProductDetailsPage&productID=83581600)
I bought a new Vista PC recently but was having lots of problems getting everything to work on it, so I continued doing most of my work (development and other) on a slow XP machine that I've had for years.
Until now, that is - I used VMware Convertor to take an image of my old XP machine, and now I'm running it on my Vista machine, and doing pretty much all my work within that XP virtual machine. I'm using VMware Worstation.
So each morning I boot up my Vista machine, and then I boot up my XP virtual machine and spend the whole day working in the XP virtual machine.
Yes, you can probably guess: I'm the complete opposite of a VMware power user... I've not figured out snapshots, linked clones, or anything more than the absolute basics of running a VM. But I set this system up OK, and it's working well. Everything's running a lot faster than it was on my old machine anyway.
However, I'm concerned about the VM getting corrupted or something and causing me to lose everything. Of course I can back the whole VM up, and I can back up files from on the VM, and I will, but I'm wondering if it might be easier and safer to use a mapped drive or public folder or something for all my work, so that if the XP VM goes kaput, my files will all be available from the Vista machine.
This would also be good because I could share files easily between the Vista and the XP machine (I do use Vista for the odd thing). But I'm wondering if it'll make it much slower to read and write files from my XP machine? (e.g. if I'm compiling a big Java project, which will involve lots of IO at once.)
The information on how to set these things up is readily available, but I haven't found it so easy to figure out the best approach for what I'm doing. Most people are using VMs for much more advanced purposes than mine.
Also I'm wondering if there are any other tips or important considerations for this doing-all-your-work-in-one-VM type of setup? e.g. what's likely to go wrong, and how can I avoid it? Anything else?
I have an Ubuntu Linux box at home which has three VMs, all totally self-contained.
The first is for my wife's business, she needs access to all the MS Office stuff and MYOB.
The second is for work, they're too tight to buy me a laptop and I'm not going to let them install their hideous security and auto-update products on my real box.
The third is my Visual Studio development VM.
It runs like a dream (although only ever tested one VM at a time). And I just backup all the VM files from Ubuntu (along with my Linux work as well) which basically gives me images of the VM hard drives.
Surely if you are doing all your work in a VM, it's time to think about changing your host machine to one that's usable, no?
As others have pointed out, it is time to think about changing your host OS to one you are comfortable with and can get your work done on. Depending on what you do on a day to day basis on your machine, I can bet Vista is going to be anything more than a big hurdle. Why tax your work and yourself by running VMware on top of a beast that Vista is only to do all your work inside the VMware?
Having said that, I do suggest that you look into VMware snapshots and cloning. Those two are powerful features, not least the former in your case, which can be used to avert, in addition to solving, a lot of common problems you can run into while running any OS inside a VMware.
I perform a crude backup once in a while where I compress the VMware image on disk with toolsk like 7-zip, and store them on backup media. However, for backups or restore points within the system, VMware's Linked Cloning is definitely a handy feature -- since Windows is susceptible to getting corrupt/infected often, with linked cloning, you can be pretty sure that you can easily revert back to the last state before the corruption took place, and continue your work unimpeded from there.
I have been using VMWare at work for a couple of years now. I use it for development and testing. As long as your base PC is good enough it is a really good way to separate your "PC Life".
I would certainly be storing your data files on a server somewhere. This can be either a mapped drive, source control, or whatever. When you start using snapshots it is really easy to wipe a session, so treating your base PC as a kind of NAS avoids this problem.
I have now decided to start using VMWare at home. I have a VM for business apps (Office, QuickBooks etc), one for Visual Studio development and several others for web servers, sql servers etc. My base PC has 8GB RAM & a 2.8GHz quad core processor, so running four or more VMs is no problem.
I'm wondering if it might be easier and safer to use a mapped drive or public folder or something for all my work
Please please please, use a version control system (that is also backed up) if you're working mainly with text files. A mapped drive or public folder is accessible, but not the best way.