{"id":7232,"date":"2018-11-06T16:08:35","date_gmt":"2018-11-06T06:08:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/?p=7232"},"modified":"2018-12-11T07:06:19","modified_gmt":"2018-12-10T21:06:19","slug":"a-simple-linux-kvm-backup-framework-using-networker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/2018\/11\/06\/a-simple-linux-kvm-backup-framework-using-networker\/","title":{"rendered":"A Simple Linux KVM Backup Framework using NetWorker"},"content":{"rendered":"

Of late I’ve been playing around a little bit with KVM. I must admit, it’s not really my virtualisation system of choice, but I’ve been using VMware in some form or another since the late 90s, so that could as much as anything be a case of what-I’m-used-to-syndrome<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"Blue<\/a>Because I’m a backup geek, once I’ve been using something for a short while, my thoughts invariably turn to the question: how would I back this up? This leads to gratitude that NetWorker and Avamar are both framework<\/em> based backup products: sure, they come with a lot of built-in functionality; but if you want something that’s not there by default, and you have a little bit of determination, you can always come up with a solution.<\/p>\n

The simplest solution for KVM would be to just shutdown the virtual machines when I needed to, then back them up. That’s fine for a lab environment, which is where I’m running them, but I don’t like doing things as if I’m in a lab environment; instead, I wanted to come up with something that could be run in a more life-like situation. So that meant being able to do backups around snapshots.<\/p>\n

With Linux KVM, that’s a bit of work. My test environment was a CentOS 7 server, which meant I had to go through the process of enabling the out-of-band QEMU options for CentOS — the default KVM install includes older API versions that don’t support live snapshot processes. On the CentOS 7 server, I deployed a simple CentOS 7 guest, too. Ideally, if you want to be able to quiesce KVM guest filesystems when you backup (i.e., commit writes to better capture the content of the filesystem during backup), you’ll need to ensure the virtual machine has the qemu-guest-agent<\/em> package installed, too.<\/p>\n

The short view of the end to end process works like this:<\/p>\n