Mailing List Archive


[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: [tlug] server partitions, LVM, and Xen




On 2007/05/22, at 16:56, Keith Bawden wrote:
You could also use have your Virtual Block Device  based on a normal
physical partition.

Then again I wonder what type of performance hit you would see when
using a file as Curt suggested. Also, I wonder if a file based
approach would help simplify things when migrating instances to new
servers.

This is exactly what I have been wondering about.

At first, I was thinking about having an RHEL5 Xen host with a database server in a VM as a file. I started thinking about a VM for the database server because it requires PHP4, and RHEL5 uses PHP5. Then I realized that I could just copy the file over to another machine as a backup for the OS. With daily database dumps and backups of the database webapp files, I would have a two-step recovery for disasters: 1-copy VM over to Xen host; 2-restore the latest dump file.

A file server would be a harder sell as a VM, but the same principle applies: the OS is a single file that is backed up to another machine or HDD, but the data would have to live in a partition on the host and be backed up (rsync) to a backup server nightly. The restore would still be two-part, though. You move the backed-up OS VM file to a Xen host and then copy the data from the backup server to a partition on the host.

However, I suspect that it is scarier than it seems (and it seems kinda scary). Is anyone doing anything like this?





Home | Main Index | Thread Index

Home Page Mailing List Linux and Japan TLUG Members Links