Snapshot VM / jails

[DD4711]

Hello,

I am little confused about backup / snapshotting my VMs: I have two Ubuntu Server VMs running in bhyve. I have configured snapshots for my whole storage where also the VM zvols are saved. I can see snapshots created by this task for my VMs. All snapshots were created while both server were running. For backup purposes these snapshots are transferred to another location.

Is this enough to restore a VM to an older snapshot? Or do I have to edit my snapshotting method for VMs like e.g. shutting down the VMs before snapshotting?

Thanks for your help.

 

[blanchet]

It is better to shut down the VMs before taking a snapshot to have consistent backups.
For professional workloads, a dedicated tool to backup VM is more convenient. In your case you can use Veeem Agent Free for Linux

 

[DD4711]

Hello @blanchet ,
thanks for your answer. I will have a look on that.

This should also apply to jails and plugins?!

 

[blanchet]

Jails are less sensitive for consistency than VM because they use directly the ZFS filesystem from the FreeNAS host,
therefore you have to take care only of applications.

The simple solution is to stop jail like VMs, but jails start and stop faster than VMs so the procedure is less annoying.

Code:

iocage stop YOUR-JAIL-NAME
iocage snapshot YOUR-JAIL-NAME
iocage start YOUR-JAIL-NAME

Or you can try a live backup of your application

Example

• backup a live InnoDB MySQL database.
• backup gitlab