Scenario 2: Protecting Xen virtual machines only

Backup the host system and virtual machines using system agent file backups of the host system.

The minimalist approach to protecting a Xen environment is to perform file backups of the host system. The file backup will capture the virtual machine’s configuration and data files.

Under this scenario, recovering a full host system and the virtual machines would mean reloading the host operating system and then restoring the last master and last incremental backups of the host system. The virtual machines will be recovered during the file restore of the host.

Individual virtual machine can be restored from the file backup of the host system.

Scenario 2 – Advantages of protecting Xen virtual machines only:

     One backup to capture all host system and virtual machine configuration data

     One backup to backup all virtual machine data when VMs use host system storage for all files

     Single virtual machines can be restored from file backup

     Very little complexity in terms of scheduling backups

Scenario 2 – Disadvantages of protecting Xen virtual machines only:

     Single backup can be quite large

     The performance benefits of concurrent backups not being used

     Unable to recovery selected files from virtual machine backups

     Virtual machine data not stored on the host system will not be protected

     No bare metal backups of the virtual machines

     When using this method of backing up virtual machines, the sparse file is expanded and sparse data is backed up as zeros. This will impact the Protected System Content on your system, using more licensed capacity than would be used if the virtual machines are backed up as registered clients to the system

     There is no flexibility in recovering Microsoft SQL or Exchange databases located on a virtual machine

Scenario 2 – Considerations for Protecting Xen virtual machines only:

     When you perform a backup of the virtual machines, you must backup all volumes that host files for the virtual machine.

     If the virtual machine is using storage external to the host system, this backup scenario will not capture all VM data.

     Hot bare metal is not supported for OES 2 on SUSE Linux Enterprise 10.