CentOS physical backup solution tips
 

Hi,
I'm working on a project and need a backup solution.
Its a single physical server used as a hypervisor to host around 20 guest instances.
Now, after using a lot of time configuring everything, I really need a good backup solution for it.

The server is configured with RAID 0, and the operating system is CentOS 7.5.

I have a local network drive, I would like to use this to store my backup files and use the same drive to restore it again.

Would really appreciate any help with this, Thanks!

Are you looking to backup your config files? Or to do a full backup that will also be used for bare-metal recovery?
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For bare-metal recovery, what are you using for RAID controller (you mentioned RAID0)?
There are several products that will not support BIOS (aka fake) RAID.
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If you only want to backup your config files, you can use rsync.

Thanks for answering!
I was hoping to do a bare-metal full backup of the system, and the system is configured with a software-based raid controller.

If you want help, answer the questions - being evasive will only dissuade people.
- which RAID0 - mdadm, LVM, something else ?
- which hypervisor - KVM, VMWare, something else ?
- can you stop/pause all the guests at the same time for the backup ?.
- what outage on the host can you tolerate ?.
- how often ?.
...

My bad if the information given was a bit limited.

The raid controller is configured with mdadm and the hypervisor is running KVM.
I have no problem stopping all the guests at the same time for the backup, and it wouldn't matter if the server went offline for a long period of time.

I'm not really interested I a solution for routine backups, I just need to have one as a restore point.
At this point, I think the easiest would be to just manually backup all the files with rsync.

What do you think?

Well, to be honest, it's not what we think. You should consider pro/con of both and make a decision.
For example, you have RAID0, in case if single disk failure, you are looking at total loss.

In that situation, you are looking at reinstall OS/apps, then copy config files back. All manual work. And, may be you have time to do this.

And, where are your VMs, are they also on the RAID0 volume? If yes, you should consider backing them up.

Moderator Response
 

Moved: This thread is more suitable in <CentOS> and has been moved accordingly to help your thread/question get the exposure it deserves.

Hi OP! Which KVM hypervisor is it running?

Are you looking to back up your guest VMs as well or not?

I'm assuming you have a single host hypervisor with local storage? I think it would be best if you tackle a complete backup as two separate tasks:
1. backup of the hypervisor
2. backup of the guests

For point 1, it depends on what you're using as the KVM host. With oVirt you can take a backup pretty simply with the engine-backup command. Ref: https://www.ovirt.org/documentation/...Migration.html

For point 2 this should be two parts in itself: a) the guests disk(s) and b) the guest configuration (such as VM name, CPU, memory etc as configured in the

I guess more info is needed to help you further.

If you have network storage and snapshot capability, and the Hosts disk is running on this; then what you could do is snapshot the storage and revert the snapshot to recover. Bear in mind that if your VMs are also on the same storage then a host restore will also restore all of the guests state as well.

If you can, then I'd recommend running the guests disks away from the hosts so you can manage them more simply; understand this may not be an option.

If you only want to backup the VMs then you can copy the folder off the system that contains the VM info and disk. But restoring this might be an issue. For example, to restore, you might need to create a dummy VM and then do a dd if=backed-up-vm-image.img of=dummy-vm-image.img