Xen and OpenVz Backup

That's right, you've got yourself a nice Xen and OpenVZ hosted setup going.  Maybe your even running a hosting package that supports both.  You want to back these up for yourself or your customers.  Doing this backup live would be a big help since no one wants to have you shut these machines down.  This is the right place to come to find out more about this.

You need to snapshot your logical volume.  You then need to mount the snapshotted volume or the partx pieces of it.  To be able to mount it your dom0 needs to be able to mount that filesystem type.  If you have Windows machines you'll need NTFS support (FUSE comes with Centos 5.4, and you'll need the ntfs-3g module for it).  Once you've mounted that, you need to back it up.

All of that is pretty easy, but it does make for a lengthy script to make it work nicely.  Jolokia is in the midst of writing our own hosting management package and one of the pieces is exactly what I'm talking about here.  I'm going to share it as soon as we have a license for it.

Prerequisites for the Xen and OpenVZ backup scripts -- prepare you systems for the backup scripts with this information.