ZFS Snapshots as a backup tool for VM's?

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natelabo

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Aug 9, 2012
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I'm just wondering if anyone else does this? Currently I have a FreeNAS box running a NFS share to a ESXi 5 box. I use ZFS snapshots to incremently backup my complete VM Datastore. I don't have another box to rsync to, to test functionality. Should this work in theory or I am jsut wasting my time and space?
 
I do two levels of backup of my esxi datastore. Every night, an auto-snap job snapshots the NFS share, so if a machine gets hosed, I can restore losing no more than 24 hours of info. Every month, I snapshot the datastore, plug in an esata drive, zfs send/recv to a pool on it, scrub that pool to make sure it's okay, unplug the drive, and delete the temporary snapshot.
 
I'm thinking since zfs snapshots aren't going to be application aware, you might have issues snapping running machines, especially with databases. powered off vm's would be fine.
 
True, but that's going to be true of pretty much any backup solution that doesn't integrate into all of the guests.
 
My concern was the application aware part. I have no doubt that it works fine when the VM's are all shutdown. Time to go a buy an external so I can test...

Also I read a little about Veeam what is it and how does it work?
 
dave99 said:
veeam can call VSS on windows vm's, and can quiesce linux vm's, which means you can run scripts to help with snapshots on machines with DB or other running apps.
Click to expand...

Its still agentless and you don't need it to do backups.
 
Wrench00 said:
Its still agentless and you don't need it to do backups.
Click to expand...

yeah, the point is though that taking backend snapshots might work fine, it might not, depends on the vm. An idle linux or windows vm probably will run fine from a ZFS snap, a heavily loaded sql or exchange probably won't if you catch it in the middle of a write.

veeam or any other app aware backup app will avoid the problem in that 2nd case.
 
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