[Box Backup] Virtual Machine backup

[Chris Wilson]

Hi Dave,

On Wed, 3 Jun 2009, Dave Bamford wrote:

>>> Ideally box should run at the hypervisor level but there are no tools 
>>> to compile at this level. I can get ssh access and get to an ash 
>>> shell. uname -a reports VMKernel.
>> 
>> Box Backup is designed to compile in pretty minimal environments. You 
>> may be able to cross-compile for the hypervisor environment by setting 
>> "LDFLAGS=-static" at configure time when building on a machine with a 
>> build environment where you can compile Box Backup normally.
>
> Where would that go exactly, I am not an expert on building /compiling. 
> I'll give it a try.

You could try putting it on the configure command line, e.g.

   ./configure LDFLAGS=-static

If that doesn't work, please post the results. You can use the ldd command 
to see whether the binary is linked to any dynamic libraries or not. If 
not then it should be good to run on the hypervisor.

> I copied the files from a vmware esxi machine to another machine via NFS 
> today 220Gb in total ( a virgin install of sbs 2003 ) and it tar gzipped 
> to 2.3Gb, of course it only contained the OS and no user data.
>
> All "bare Metal" backups solutions seem to cost in excess of $500. The 
> big issue to me is the delta blocking which box does well. But by taking 
> a new snapshot each time box will see this as a new file and back the 
> whole thing up. Even with an uplink of 2M which you can get with ADSL2+ 
> it will take too long.

If you replace the existing snapshot with a new one with the same file 
name, then Box Backup should do an incremental backup of it, in theory. If 
not, please let me know and I'll investigate.

Cheers, Chris.
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