This page describes how the VMs and VM-Templates are backed-up inside the stoney cloud.

The main idea to backup a VM or a VM-Template is, to divide the task into three subtasks:

• Snapshot: Save the machines state (CPU, Memory and Disk)
• Merge: Merge the Disk-Snapshot with the live-image
• Retain: Export the snapshot files

A more detailed and technical description for these three sub-processes can be found in the following sub-chapters.

Snapshot

1. Create a snapshot with state:
   • Save the VMs state:

     virsh save my-vm my-vm.state

   • Rename the actual disk image: mv my-vm.qcow2 my-vm-backup.qcow2.
   • Create the new disk image with the old as backing file: qemu-img create -f qcow2 -b my-vm-backup.qcow2 my-vm.qcow2.
   • Set correct ownership and permission to the newly created image:
     • chown root:vm-storage my-vm.qcow2.
     • chmod 660 my-vm.qcow2.
   • Restore the VMs state: virsh restore my-vm.state.
2. Merge the disk images my-vm.qcow2 and my-vm-snap.qcow2 to a single image: virsh qemu-monitor-command my-vm --hmp "block_stream drive-virtio-disk0".
3. Move the files to the backup location:
   • Move the old disk image to the backup location and add the date as suffix to not overwrite older backups: mv my-vm-backup.qcow2 /path/to/backup/my-vm-backup.qcow2.date
   • Move the state file to the backup location and add the date as suffix to not overwrite older backups: mv my-vm.state /path/to/backup/my-vm.state.date

Merge

Retain