Moving from OpenVZ 7 to Proxmox 8.3: just a few basic questions (consistent live backups)

[tranxene50]

Hello from France!

Background:

- I have used Proxmox 2 & 3 in the past but switched to OpenVZ 6 & 7 because it was a better choice when using Linux containers (almost no overhead)
- Now, I am switching back to Proxmox because QEMU is way more stable/advanced when dealing with VM (at this time: single server, no cluster, LVM)

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However, I have a "critical" question about backups.

Is it possible (with QEMU), when doing a backup to get :

- a consistent data snapshot of the VM (seems ok)
- a consistent memory dump of the VM (not sure**)

** "dump-guest-memory" could be a solution but how to restore this "image" in a new VM?

The idea is to get a truly restorable live backup:

- when restored, data, memory and processus are running again like nothing happened**
- there is no data loss or corruption at all (ex: MySQL/MariaDB) and no need to check the FS

** already possibe because live migrations between nodes seems to to that (is a cluster needed?)

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Since I am "new" (again) to using Proxmox, please feel free to send me RTFM links without comments! ^^

Have a great sunday!

 

[fiona]

Hi,
backups in Proxmox VE do not contain the VM's memory or device state, just a consistent state of the disks for a given point in time. What you are looking for are snapshots, where you include the VM's memory and device state too. The underlying mechanism used is the same as for live-migration, it's just written to a special state file/volume.

EDIT: However, snapshots are still associated with the original disks and guest and can only be restored (i.e. rollback) for the specific guest.