The new version is available on the download page

Documentation can be found on the documentation page

The changes in this version are:

1. Added additional checks to several of the VM functions to pass the VM to the vmrun command with the [datastore] vmx format instead of a normal Unix path (The server 2.0 vmrun command was frequently unable to figure out the correct VM the command was reffering to when the Unix path was passed).

The new version is available on the download page

Documentation can be found on the documentation page

I just put up an experimental release of VMBackup (2.84).  This version is considered experimental because it required significant changes to make it work with VMware Server 2.0 release.

Note, currently only the command line vmbackup utility supports VMware server 2.0.  There will be support for VMware Server 2.0 in the graphical interface in the next release.

The new version is available on the download page

Documentation can be found on the documentation page ]]> http://computing.dwighthubbard.info/index.php/2008/12/01/new-experimental-release-of-vmbackup-supports-vmware-server-20/feed/ 3 http://computing.dwighthubbard.info/index.php/2008/11/12/script-to-generate-mythvideo-posters/ http://computing.dwighthubbard.info/index.php/2008/11/12/script-to-generate-mythvideo-posters/#comments Thu, 13 Nov 2008 07:57:02 +0000 dhubbard http://computing.dwighthubbard.info/?p=94 There is a new script (createvideoposters.py) to generate posters for mythvideo in the download area.

The final release made changes that cause VMbackup to not function.  The new method of interacting with virtual machines have not turned out to be straightforward to implement and I am still working on getting it to work.

The background

I was hired at Symantec a little more than 3 years ago to administer customer facing Solaris and Linux servers.  My area of responsibility rapidly expanded to the point where my primary area of responsibility involved managing several hundred Solaris and Linux servers, including the companies primary ERP systems.  I eventually moved to a small group to rapidly design and deploy an enterprise VMware based virtualization infrastructure in order to rapidly consolidate a datacenter.  I have since then been doing engineering and deployment work to constantly expand the infrastructure for the rapidly changing corporate requirements.

Moving Forward

Today I announce the creation of Effective Automation Solutions LLC. This consulting practice allows me to provide the architecture and support services for businesses of all sizes in concert with a number of other computing professionals I have had the privelege to work with over the last 22 years.

There a number of differences between the two.

A physical machine is normally purchased one time and generally requires additional, money, and significant downtime to upgrade. In contrast although the resources to run a virtual machine cost money, they are shared and can be upgraded in the future easily from the shared resource pool.

This difference is a important because normally the specifications of a physical machine will be defined to meet the peak usage at the end of the estimated service life of the physical hardware. If this same method is used on a virtual machine it will waste money and negatively impact of the performance of not only the virtual machine itself but also other virtual machines running on the same virtualization server.

The reason for this is that in order for a virtual machine to run all the virtual resources that the virtual machine needs have to be allocated and available to it. So for example if you build a virtual machine with 4 virtual cpus it will not be able to begin executing until 4 individual CPUs are available for use. Also, while it is executing it will use all 4 CPUs, preventing other virtual machines from being able to use those resources and thereby impacting their performance. As a result a virtual machine that use fewer resources will less frequently have performance issues when there are other virtual machines needing the same resources.

So, to get the best performance out of a virtual machine you want to provide it with all the resources it will need with as little headroom as possible.

As always you can download it from the download page

The plan is for the restore format to be selectable so it will be possible to restore a virtual machine to run under a different virtualization program.  I.E. taking a backup of a Virtual Machine running under VMware Server and restoring it as a Virtual Box VM.

The changes in this version are:

• Fix to the logging code to work correctly if the log directory doesn’t exist.  Hopefully this will fix the backup gui so it will work under SuSE Linux.
• Added partial support for cold and LVM backups of VirtualBox Virtual machines via the command line and GUI.  Only tar, tar.gz and tar.bz2 formats are supported for backups of VirtualBox VMs.  (Note the vmrestore utiltiy does not understand Virtual Box Virtual Machines yet)
• Some code was added to support backing up VMWare Virtual Machines with vmdks in multiple locations (this is not complete however)
• Added some fixes to support configurations in which more than one piece of Virtualization software is installed (tested on a system with both VMWare Workstation and VirtualBox running).
• Added a header to the archives so the vmrestore utility doesn’t need to guess the Virtual Machine type in order to support conversions in the future.

The new version is available on the download page

Documentation can be found on the documentation page

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:

• Fixed a crash when using the “dir” backup method to local disk.
• More code fixes for VMware Fusion.  The command line backup command seems to be working with VMware Fusion, although cold backups have the annoying tendency to start VMWare Fusion if it isn’t running.  However, there is still more work to do in order to build a Mac OSX package and get the vmbackup/vmrestore graphical interfaces working.
• Fix for VMWare Workstation and VMWare Fusion to locate virtual machines that are not currently running.

The new release is available on the download page

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

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

The changes for this version are:

• A fix for a bug that would cause restore operations to fail without any error messages for certain types of archives.
• Removed the code that performed a suspend/resume when using LVM snapshots.  It isn’t needed since the LVM snapshot is consistent to the point in time the snapshot was taken and the snapshot requirement meant LVM snapshot backups only worked if VMware tools was installed in the VM.

The new release is available on the download page

The new version is available on the download page

The new release is available on the download page and more documentation can be found on the VMbackup page.

The new release is available on the download page and more documentation can be found on the VMbackup page.