[clue-tech] Virtualization, GuestOS bare metal restore/reload

[mike havlicek]

Hmm ...

After thinking about what might happen with an import after export ...
I anticipate a trick will be rescue booting the virtual machine so as
to be able to restore say root from a level 0 dump ... and wonder if
a dump/restore method with linux tools is even feasable. On a physical machine I usually just do a rescue boot from CD create if necessary the partitions/logical volumes/filesystems/etc layout mount the targets and restore. I am guessing there is an easy straight forward way to do the analog of a bare metal restore with this VMware stuff, but I always end up rigging something convoluted :)

-Mike

--- On Tue, 3/31/09, chris fedde <chris at fedde.us> wrote:

> From: chris fedde <chris at fedde.us>
> Subject: Re: [clue-tech] Virtualization, GuestOS bare metal restore/reload
> To: "CLUE technical discussion" <clue-tech at cluedenver.org>
> Date: Tuesday, March 31, 2009, 4:16 PM
> I can say that at work we have  105
> guests running on 10  VMWare 3i hosts. All using NFS
> stores.  It works great!  two of the NFS servers are high
> performance NetApp and BlueArc NAS.  One is a server class
> P4 running ubuntu and the kernel NFS server.  All are on
> 1Gig ethernet.
> 
> 
> Among the many things I have not yet done is benchmark IO
> on these platforms.
> 
> On Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 10:50 AM,
> mike havlicek <mhavlicek1 at yahoo.com>
> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> Hello,
> 
> 
> 
> I have been poking around with the idea of virtualization.
> I have an IBM
> 
> eServer xseries 360 that I have been playing with VMware
> ESX 3i demo. The immediate problem that I see is how to bare
> metal restore a geust. I suspect that add on products handle
> everything one could wish to do.
> 
> 
> 
> The scenario I am anticipating is having to rebuild the
> hypervisor itself
> 
> say on a new set of disks and then reloading the guests. I
> figure with the
> 
> VMware products there is a clean way to do this sort of
> thing at full purchase prices.
> 
> 
> 
> What I am wondering is what other alternative products
> folks have experience with handling this sort of rebuild and
> any suggestions for hosting a "hypervisor" on this
> IBM server. I am toying with the idea of using NFS mounted
> disk space from a Solaris 9 server to store VMs. I have not
> yet looked into how this would work with Xen. I do suspect
> that any
> 
> 
> hypervisor running under redhat or a derivative would
> require a non redhat
> 
> kernel on this hardware. In theory the NFS mounted space
> works OK with ESX 3i, although taking the mounts offline
> from the NFS server threw a monkey
> 
> wrench in things. (I did stop the VMs that were stored on
> the NFS mounts, prior to unsharing but I didn't put the
> hypervisor in maintenance mode (and don't know if that
> would have circumvented those VMs becoming unknown). But I
> get ahead of myself ... and further ahead what about SAN ...
> (I don't know when I will have my home SAN running :)
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> 
> 
> Mike
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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