vzdump directly to LTO5 Tape Drive ?

[fpausp]

I would like to vzdump my vm's directly to the tape drive without the use of a hdd.

can someone help me please ?

 

[JBB]

As hinted at in the man page, it's probably best to use an NFS server for the dump itself (massively faster than dumping straight to tape I would think), then copy the dump files to the tape drive at your leisure.

If you have no alternative but to dump straight to tape, then do you know the device name or mount point the drive has on your system? If so, then it should be something like:

vzdump <vmNum> –dumpdir /somewhere –ionice 1

(where /somewhere is the mount point of your tape drive or the device)

I don't have direct experience of tape drives though.

 

[fpausp]

The device Name is /dev/nst0 or /dev/st0 ...

 

[udo]

I would like to vzdump my vm's directly to the tape drive without the use of a hdd.

can someone help me please ?

Hi,
you can't do that.
vzdump stores the vm-disk-data in an temp-file and create after that the complete archive with this file and the config. For this you need an filesystem and not an tape-blockdevice.

But you can copy the vzdump-file afterward to the lto-drive (mt for positioning and then you can use unix-commands like tar or dd).
Or you use an backup tool like bareos for this.

Udo

 

[fpausp]

OK... maybe with a script, one by one to save space ?

1. vzdump 100 to disk -
2. tar the dump to tape -
3. delete vzdump 100 from disk -

4. vzdump vm 101 to disk
and so on...

 

[e100]

You could write a vzdump hook script that performs the actions desired.
Read the comments, it has an example of scp the backup file to remote host, add in your copy to tape commands there. After copied to tape you could delete the file too.

You can write the hook script in any language, the example is perl.

https://github.com/proxmox/pve-manager/blob/master/vzdump-hook-script.pl