On 09/07/2018 12:06 PM, Lentes, Bernd wrote:
Hi,
currently i'm following https://wiki.libvirt.org/page/Live-disk-backup-with-active-blockcommit. I 'm playing around with it and it seems to be quite nice.
What i want is a daily consistent backup of my image file of the guest.
I have the idea of the following procedure:
- Shutdown the guest (i can live with a downtime of a few minutes, it will happen in the night).
And i think it's the only way to have a real clean snapshot
Not the only way - you can also use qemu-guest-agent with a trusted
guest to quiesce all filesystem I/O after freezing database operations
at a consistent point, for a clean snapshot of a live guest. But
shutting down is indeed safe, and easier to reason about than worrying
whether your qga interaction is properly hooked into all necessary
places for a live quiesce.
- create a snapshot with snapshot-create-as: snapshot-create-as guest testsn --disk-only
- start the guest again. Changes will now go into the overlay, as e.g. inserts in a database
- rsync the base file to a cifs server. With rsync not the complete, likely big file is transferred but just the delta
We're also trying to add support for incremental backups into a future
version of libvirt on top of the qemu 3.0 feature of persistent bitmaps
in qcow2 images, which could indeed guarantee that you transfer only the
portions of the guest disk that were touched since the last backup. But
as that's still something I'm trying to code up, your solution of using
rsync to pick out the deltas is as good as anything you can get right now.
- blockcommit the overlay: blockcommit guest /path/to/testsn --active --wait --verbose --pivot
- delete the snapshot: snapshot-delete guest --snapshotname testsn --metadata
- remove the overlay
Is that ok ? How "safe" is blockcommit on a running guest ?
Yep, that's the right way to do it! It's perfectly safe - the guest
doesn't care whether it is reading/writing from the backing file or the
overlay, and even if the blockcommit action is aborted, you can restart
it for the same effects.
(Okay, if you want to get technical, you need to know that committing
from 'Base <- mid <- top' down to 'Base' leaves 'mid' in an inconsistent
state - but that's not something the guest can see through 'top'; and
your specific case is just committing to the immediate backing layer
rather than skipping layers like that).
It's possible that during the rsync, when the guest is running, some inserts are done in a database.
As long as the backing file is read-only during the rsync (which it is,
since all your guest writes are going to the overlay), then nothing the
guest can do will interfere with what rsync can see. Just be sure that
you don't start the blockcommit until after rsync is done.
Is it safe to copy the new sectors (i assume that's what blockcommit does) under a running database ?
Or is it only safe doing blockcommit on a stopped guest ?
Live blockcommit is safe, and exists so you don't have to stop the guest.
For a bit more insight into what is going on under the hood, the slides
from my KVM Forum talk from a few years back may give some nice insights:
http://events17.linuxfoundation.org/sites/events/files/slides/2015-qcow2-expanded.pdf
Thanks for any answer.
Bernd
P.S. Is the same procedure possible when the guest disk(s) reside directly in a plain logical volume, without a file system in-between ?
Live blockcommit works onto any host storage protocol (whether
filesystem, block device via LVM, or even remote access such as NBD or
ceph). The key is that your overlay is a qcow2 file that is tracking
the deltas during the time in which you are capturing your backup of the
backing file, and then blockcommit safely writes those deltas back into
the backing file prior to no longer needing the overlay.
--
Eric Blake, Principal Software Engineer
Red Hat, Inc. +1-919-301-3266
Virtualization: qemu.org | libvirt.org
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