Re: How to do an automated backup?

[Chris Lalancette <clalance@redhat.com>]

Steve Lorimer wrote:
> Ok, should be a simple question here:  How to backup a KVM host image.
...
> My second plan:
> 1) Use virsh to shutdown the VM
> 2) Backup vm file & xml
> 3) Start vm (regular bootup)
> This takes longer, but can be tolerated in order to get a backup.  
> However, this fails also:
> virsh -c qemu:///system shutdown kvmtest
> The command fails to send any kind of shutdown request to the VM guest.  
> As a result, the only thing that works is to kill it (the virsh command 
> for that does work).  However, this is not acceptable for a backup.

"virsh shutdown" should work, provided you have a new enough version of libvirt
(what version are you using?), you have the <acpi/> tag set in the libvirt XML,
and your guest (what kind of guest is it?) is using ACPI.  virsh shutdown works
by sending an ACPI event to the guest, basically equivalent to hitting the soft
power button on a piece of hardware.  In recent testing, I was able to use virsh
shutdown to shut down basically any 2.6 based Linux guest, and any Windows guest
using ACPI.

That said, doing the backup "inside" the guest, as suggested by Javier, is
probably a better solution.

-- 
Chris Lalancette