computing.dwighthubbard.info

I made a good deal of progress since the last post and at this point I hope to have something working well by the end of the week.  However the bad news is it doesn’t look like it’s possible to support hot backups using snapshots on VirtualBox.  Although VirtualBox allows for the creation of a Snapshot it doesn’t allow it to be deleted without completely powering down the virtual machine.  However, all is not lost since hot backups with LVM snapshots should still work.

While adding support for VirtualBox Virtual machines I realized it is possible to have VirtualBox, VMware, QEmu and Parallels installed on the same computer.  VMBackup was written with an assumption that there would only be one virtualiztion package installed.  As a result I am having to make some fairly significant changes to support systems with multiple virtualization software installed.

So with luck I will have a versioin of VMBackup that can backup VirtualBox virtual machines sometime this week.

This version just fixes bugs and does not add any features.

The changes for this version are:

• Fix to the Linux LVM backup code to work even if the Volume group is not the last one listed in the df command output.
• Code changes to make vmbackup work correctly with vmware fusion. Hopefully this is all the code needed to support fusion properly. However, the code relies on applescript code that the packaging scripts aren’t packaging properly, so vmware fusion backups are closer to working but not quite there yet. Command line restores on mac osx should work fine but haven’t been tested yet.
• Changes to vmrestore.gui to give more information in the virtual machine list
• Changes to make backups work better under vmware workstation when it is not being run as the root user.
• Made suspend/resume during lvm backups an option. The suspend/resume causes a very short service interruption and the resulting state is not useful if the restore is done to a system with a CPU that isn’t compatible with the CPU of the system that did the backup.

The new release is available on the download page