I inherited a number of virtualized hosts running Windows and Linux guests. The host platform is ESXi + Unitrends Enterprise Backup. The systems are soon apt for hardware upgrades.

<rant>
Frankly I have been completely fed up with this licensed software. It is not that I have to pay for it (the customer does anyway) but all the complications encountered when dealing with licensed software.

For example, the installations are ESXi 5.1 and 5.5. I have been able to download ESXi installations to re-install from scratch after a disaster. And then one day I could not find any link anymore to ESXi 5.x, only ESXi 6. With new license challenges of course. Thank to a deep link in some forum post I was able to re-find ESXi 5.x. But this is not what you want when you have to do a bare metal restore.

Then the same story for Unitrends. The features and specifications are great. But the "legacy" user interface is complicated and counter-intuitive. It has been superseded by a new HTML5 user interface. Fine. But all user manuals and instructions for the legacy interface have been deleted. Like it never existed. Great when you have to work on an unknown system.

So I purchased the newest version of Unitrends, spent several weeks to learn it inside and out. Nice things like you can't restore a backup copy if your registered Unitrends VM crashed as well. License issue again. On top of that, when I was ready to move my purchased version 9.2 to production, it was suddenly superseded by version 10. And version 9.2 disappeared like it never existed.
</rant>

So enough reasons to dump and kick out any licensed product. Based on the current state-of-the-art I want to use KVM as virtualization platform.

Experience learned that for my night rest it is better to concentrate on backup and restore rather than installation of a system. Installation always succeeds.

It seems that for KVM there are to commonly used options: LVM snapshots and copy and qcow2 snapshots and copy. LVM snapshots feel a bit awkward. This feels like using a byte level backup instead of file level backup.

I would like to have two restore options:

1. Restore a complete VM after a total crash. This is obvious. But once I have the backup, I want to be able to restore to any KVM host. Provided the correct system requirements are met of course.
2. Restore at the file level after a less drastic disaster, like ransonmware. I assume for this option I need to do some work or conversion on the backup image in whichever form it is. Mount the converted image. Be able to access it on the file level.

Backups must be performed on live systems. Short halting to create a snapshot is acceptable. Halting the VM while copying the complete image file is not.

What are your thoughts on this?

jlinkels

The virtual machine is held in files, each VM has it's own directory. Snapshots are held in separate files. You simply copy the files in each VM directory. If you lose the VM, you write the backup to the VM directory. Between backups make snapshots.

I have googled a lot on this and as it seems the procedure is to create a snapshot and copy the VM file. Which can be copied back to the KVM host after a crash. The second requirement seems to be fulfilled by simply mounting the correct partition from the VM file.

So it seems all tools are there. Just not a complete backup/restore application. Correct?

Would work for me.

jlinkels

Yes.