Hi Bob,
I just want to to throw in another alternative to make choice harder ... :-)
> The scenario...
> centos server acting as a virtual host. Virtual machines are webservers
> and dns servers. All on one machine, all running centos 6.
> Virtual machines are kvm, sitting in lvm storage.
My basic setup is quite similar to yours. CentOS 5 machine working as host, several virtual CentOS 5/6 boxes on that host, but additionally there are some Mac OS X and Ubuntu boxes around that also need to be backed up, some of them in remote locations.
I have a NAS drive set up in my small datacenter that works as an iSCSI host and serves a LUN for backups. The virtual host machine runs Bacula dir and sd, with the backup volumes on the LUN. All Clients run bacula fd and connect to the server, the ones connecting from the internet use SSL encryption and certificate authentication. I run full backups once a week, and daily incrementals.
For the last half year or so, the solution has proven rock-solid, not a single failure. I had to restore several files during that period, and there wasn't any problem at all with that as well.
Database backup is done using pre-scripts that perform a database dump and then back up that dump, which is a bit of a downside as other solutions often have database backup plugins, but nothing that could not be solved. After initial setup, configuration is done on the Bacular directory server alone, which saves some amount of maintenance. Backup strategies can be defined in a very flexible way, too.
There also is a feature that allows you to define a base system (e.g. a freshly installed CentOS box) and tell the server just to back up differences from that base system, saving large amounts of storage if you have many similar machines to be backed up.
Best regards,
Peter.
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