Re: [Xen-users] Backup in a Xen

[Albert Hopkins <xen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 2007-03-27 at 22:34 +0100, Alan Pearson wrote:
> Albert,
> 
> Could you explain block-attach ?

[X-Posted to xen-users as others might find this useful.]

The xm command have sub-commands called "block-attach" and
"block-detach".  The xm man page explains them (although I think
"block-detach" has inaccurate documentation the last I checked).
Basically they let you hotplug/unplug a (virtual) block device to a
domU.  This is done from the dom0.  So basically what I do is:

dom0# lvcreate -L1G -s -n mydomU sata1/mydomU-snap
dom0# xm block-attach amandaserver phy:sata1/mydomU-snap
dom0# blkid=$(xm block-list amandaserver| tail -n 1| awk '{ print
$1; }')

"xm block-list" lists the block devices attached to a domain.  I'm
making the assumption that the last item in the list is the one most
recently attached.  So far this is has worked but I haven't seen it
actually documented so the behavior could change.  Unfortunately you
have to block-detach by block id instead of the actual device/filename
so we need to keep track of the block id.

After the snapshot has been created and block-attached to the Amanda
server.  The backup server server fscks the newly attached devices,
mounts them, does its backups, and unmounts the attached snapshots.
Then from dom0:

dom0# xm block-detach amandaserver $blkid
dom0# lvremove -f sata1/mydomU-snap

I've described how one would do this from the command line.  Of course
my actual backups use scripts.  I can post those if you want. The
command-line description hopefully gives you the basic idea though.

You can also hot-attach network devices, but I haven't played with that.
--
Albert W. Hopkins


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