Domain Management and Control (Xen DM&C)

A group of Linux daemons make up Domain Management and Control. These services support the overall management and control of the virtualization environment and exist within the Domain 0 virtual machine.

Domain U (Dom U) PV Guest – The Dom U PV Guests are paravirtualized machines.

Domain U (Dom U) HVM Guest – The Dom U HVM guests are fully virtualized machines.

Xen guest operating systems supported:

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP1/SP2

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 SP3/SP4

Open Enterprise Server 2

NetWare 6.5 SP7

Windows Server 2000, 2003, 2008, 2012

Windows XP

Windows Vista

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5

Protecting OES on Linux with Xen

Unitrends supports Xen host and guest operating system backup and restore. To fully protect an OES on Linux system with Xen enabled, you must perform the following tasks:

When backing up the host, at a minimum, backup the host root file system to capture the Xen configuration information.

If you want to backup virtual machines while backing up the host, backup each file system that contains files that make up that virtual machine. This includes the Xen configuration information in the root file system and virtual machine data that may be on other file systems. 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 backup system, using more licensed capacity than would be used if the virtual machines are backed up as registered clients to the backup system.

You cannot restore individual files on a virtual machine from a backup of the host.

Virtual machines can be backed up to allow individual file restore by installing the appropriate protection software for the guest operating system and registering the virtual machine to the backup system as a client and using standard backup and restore operations. If performing full backups of the host and virtual machines, data on the virtual machines may be captured twice and this can have a significant impact on the total system content on the backup system. To avoid this, when performing file-level backups of the virtual machine data, exclude the directories holding virtual machine data from the file-level backup of the host system.

If the virtual machine is using external storage (not disk space on the host system), you will need to install the protection software on the virtual machine to protect the data that exists on the external storage volumes. For example, if a VM is using storage on a SAN, it will be necessary to backup the VM as a client registered to the backup system.