Livebackup feature for qemu/qemu-kvm

[Jagane Sundar <jagane@sundar.org>]

Hello All,

I have been working on a feature called Livebackup for qemu-kvm 
(actually it is applicable to qemu). This is a feature that enables a 
system administrator or a backup program to take full and incremental 
backups of running VMs. It is explained in more detail here:

http://wiki.qemu.org/Features/Livebackup

I had initiated communication with Stefan a week or so ago regarding 
this feature and we had some discussion comparing it with two other 
proposals - Snapshot and Snapshot2.

I have further updated my documentation, and I have been testing my code 
more intensively over the last week or so. I have two git source trees 
based on qemu and qemu-kvm for this codebase. I will continue to 
maintain both till it is necessary.

At this time I would like to restart the discussion around Livebackup 
and related features.

Having a live backup feature for kvm will make it a better solution for 
IaaS clouds compared to xen. I would like to solicit feedback from all 
of you folks involved in the block subsystem of qemu. Stefan mentioned 
that Jes is the person most intimately involved in the block subsystem, 
so Jes - your feedback is particularly important.

Thanks,
Jagane