[libvirt-users] libvirt, lvm thin provisioning

Michael Mol mikemol at gmail.com
Tue Dec 3 21:41:06 UTC 2013


On Tue, 03 Dec 2013 13:23:37 -0700
Eric Blake <eblake at redhat.com> wrote:

> On 12/03/2013 12:37 PM, Michael Mol wrote:
> 
> > A pity. Thin provisioning would be (as I see it) the first step to
> > whole-VM snapshots as found in systems like VMWare ESX. I'd love to
> > be able to pull that off using Linux/QEMU/KVM. Or at least be able
> > to snapshot a running VM's disk to be able to pull backups off the
> > snapshot without interrupting service in the VM guests.
> 
> Ah, but you already CAN do that.  Libvirt external snapshots (since
> libvirt 1.0.5, or even earlier if you don't care about machine state
> but just disk state) coupled with qemu 1.3 or newer is perfectly able
> to create qcow2 chains such that you can do a backup of the snapshot
> without any downtime to the guest.  Admittedly, keeping things optimal
> so that the qcow2 chain doesn't grow without bounds is a bit harder
> problem, and qemu 1.7 has added some new functionality not yet
> integrated into libvirt to make life easier for taking snapshots
> without having to track the cleanup efforts.  But your claim that
> libvirt can't do online backups the way ESX can aren't quite true :)
> 

Excellent to hear!

Where can I find out more about how to handle cleanup? I don't need an
automatic backup process requiring manual cleanup.
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