Re: Backup OEL Virtual Machine

On 2015/07/21 13:37, MARK BRINSMEAD wrote:

> This is often true. And where it is, hypervisor "snapshots" are probably going to be your best bet, especially if they are smart enough to de-dupe blocks that remain unchanged from your "template". But remember that recovery is still "all or nothing", so you may have to take some significant downtime just to restore a damaged crontab.
>
> If you arrange separate per-file backups for the things that you EXPECT to change relatively frequently (crontabs, /etc/oratab, etc.), snapshots could well be good enough.
>
> Alternatively, an "incremental" filesystem-level backup is only going to backup the files that change, anyway. Would there be any harm in running an incremental backup once a day or once a week on a filesystem where almost nothing changes anyway?
>
> All I am suggesting here is that, like anywhere else, one should first give thought to the RECOVERY requirements, and then choose the backup solution that best fits them.
>
> There is no such thing as a "one size fits all" backup solution". Anybody who tells you differently is probably trying to sell you something. ;-) [Apologies to William Goldman.]

We use Tivoli for VMs on VMWare, including the only Linux server -- OL5 running EM12c. It also uses snapshots for backups. However, the snapshot can be mounted on the Tivoli server for individual file restores, as we proved a few weeks ago when I accidentally saved over the wrong file on the Linux server. It does take a little non-standard work to get Linux ext3/4 snapshot mounts to be read by the Windows server, but it worked very well, albeit somewhat slower than a native Win snapshot mount.

While this backup size fits us, as Mark implied, YMMV.

:)

Rich  

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