VM Server Backup Strategy

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Daily Backups

Daily backups are accomplished on selected VMs by installing Tivoli in the Guest O/S and configuring and running it in the normal way.

Not all VMs are backed up daily. See VM Servers for the current list.

Weekly Backups

All VMs are backed up weekly.

This is accomplished as follows:

Cron Processing

On Saturday mornings at 2AM, a cron job starts that performs the following actions:

  • Loop through all Guest VMs, one at a time, doing the following:
  1. Suspend the guest machine
  2. Tar up and compress the guest machine files to /var/vmbackups/<machinename>.tar.gz
  3. Startup the guest machine
The crontab Entry
[root@pkirack8 ~]# crontab -l
#------------------------------------------------------------
# VMware server status change check.  Run hourly
0 * * * * /root/status.pl
#------------------------------------------------------------
#------------------------------------------------------------
# Tivoli Scheduler
30 8 * * * /opt/tivoli/tsm/client/ba/bin/dsm_sch
#------------------------------------------------------------
#------------------------------------------------------------
# System update.  Run daily at midnight
0 0 * * * /usr/sbin/up2date -u
#------------------------------------------------------------
#------------------------------------------------------------
# VM Backups.  Run daily at 11pm
0 23 * * * /root/vm_backup.pl
#------------------------------------------------------------
The Backup Script

The backup script, written in Perl, can be found here

The Status Script

The status script, written in Perl, can be found here

Tivoli Processing

On Saturdays at 8AM, the Tivoli client starts and backs up the host machine in the normal way.

Notes:

  • The Tivoli client is configured (in the /opt/tivoli/tsm/client/ba/bin/dsm.sys file) to exclude the /var/lib/vmware/Virtual Machines directory
Software Download and Installation

Software and installation instructions for the Tivoli client can be found at http://backup.ncsa.uiuc.edu/tsm/

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