Keith Smith - My Blog

xackup for xenserver

Saturday, June 20, 2015 - by Keith A. Smith

I recently was tasked with to rebuild an entire xenserver farm, i started to put together a plan of action on how I was going to accomplish this. I started thinking about the servers, I figured I could grab a USB sticks and create some bootable USB sticks from the xenserver iso. Next I made note of all the hypervisor network settings (screen shots are the best way to go) so that part was covered, lastly can the virtual guest and storage. A new NAS was going to be in play so i needed to find a way to backup the guest and export them, I found a software called xackup which was priced right but I wanted to vet it before making a purchase. I downloaded the trial (14 days for the elite version) installed on a test machine to put it through its paces, I backed up one guest while it was running to see how it would handle it. 

The backup ran smooth and didn't cause any errors or outages which was great, now I wanted to test the restore capabilities of xackup. Since the virtual guest I was working with wasn't important I powered it off and deleted it, yes you read that right. Since I haven't used this product before I did have an xenserver export (e.g. .xva) file just in case xackup failed me. I proceeded to restore the virtual guest with xackup, about 20mins later the restore was complete and the guest vm was in great shape which i define as (virtual disk restored & attached, network settings correct, OS start up clean, etc) once all I confirmed all that I knew this was going to be my tool of choice. I proceeded to backup all the virtual guest which took quite bit of time then i reviewed the log reports for each virtual guest backup, they all were successful with no errors.

I then shutdown all the guest, followed by the hypervisors and lastly the storage array. Next I swap out the hypervisors along with storage, with all the new gear in place I get the install for xenserver going on all the hypervisors. While the installs were running for xenserver, I setup the LUNs on the NAS so the I can point the hypervisors at the correct targets. Once the xenserver installs were completed, I setup the network addressing and make sure the NTP is working correctly (I have had issues with this in the past) then I launch xencenter so I can setup the networking on the hypervisors, create a pool,add the hypervisors to the pool then finally map the CIFS and iSCSI storage. 

Now here comes the fun part i need to restore all the virtual guest, I launched the xackup software so I can start restores but at that point in noticed that there is no way to restore all the guest at the same time nor anyway to schedule the restores. That was a big flaw to me since you can schedule multiple backups, so I was stuck having to restore each guest two at time (I had 2 laptops running with the xackup on it) and eventually everything was backup and running on new shinny gear. I have made a few suggestions to the developers of xackup but overall I think its a great tool for the price and its simple, effective and affordable.
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Direct Link to this Comment Fungusware - Saturday, July 4, 2015 09:32
Hey Keith,

Thanks for the write up. We've often wondered about having a list of Restores that could be stored for reuse and scheduled, but (up until now) we didn't have a case where anyone had asked.

Its a great feature and we'll jump to work on it after the current Early Access version goes into the stable channel.

Cheers
Fungusware
Direct Link to this Comment Riffin - Thursday, May 25, 2017 14:31
Hello,

Will xackup run for a server which is offline?
Direct Link to this Comment Keith - Wednesday, June 14, 2017 22:18
If I recall correctly it will.

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