@francesco-provino said in KVM in Production - Build it yourself:
Seems that Bacula has a KVM plugin: https://www.baculasystems.com/enterprise-backup-solution-with-bacula-systems/virtual-machine-backup-software . Any experience with that?
No experience but reading the online man suggests a lot of pita to setup bacula, while the kvm plugin seems quite abysmal. Not much more then the famous perl script or @stacksofplates script
I think what @DustinB3403 feels bad is the mix of config and logic in the same file. If you would be able to separate the working logic from config, then edit a bunch of lines in a txt would not be so terrible .
Conceptually it should mot be so terrible:
1- snap
2- mount snap and backup location
3- run borg backup or similar
4- unmount everything
Testing is the most long part. With stuff like borg you should be confident in both backup and recovery.
Acutally recovery is trickier?! Don't know, should be like:
1- shutdown the machine
2- mount machine and backup location
3- restore
Issue is: how to programmatically tell borg which snap to use to recover...
I guess 2 of days of work... And I'm not super fast at writing code.
What has stopped me from using kvm in production was: what if I have to off load stuff to other people? Will they be
skilled enough for this crap?! So I just moved to hyperv+altaro...
@tim_g if you look at the mikrotik switch offering it is quite limited wrt Ubiquiti
@tim_g said in Business WIFI Planning and Deployment:
Just curious why nobody likes or recommends Mikrotiks?
our ISP uses mikrotik grear. we have radio backup un mikrotik antennas.
@black3dynamite said in Business WIFI Planning and Deployment:
Have anyone ever used Aruba http://www.arubanetworks.com/?
we have aruba stuff at work.
switches are ok, no problem nice stuff.
APs are also great, I really like the virtual controlled embedded in APs and set inHA by default (the virtual controller dies? it its respawn on another AP).
main issue you must find a tech which is able to tune the load balancing... we are still struggling at it...
an UI is terrible.
@DustinB3403 almost forgotten... I've this stub on github
@dustinb3403 I've been using this script in production for somethin glike 1 year when I was using KVM as hypervisor.
this is the facto the only good solution for KVM. It also supports gluster volumes!
you do nopt need to bring the VM down IF you build your VM disk on some snapshottable stuff like LVM or qcow (not sure about the latter).
I've written a small note for my usage at the time... need a bit to translate it in english. this is how I used it in brief
wget http://repo.firewall-services.com/misc/virt/virt-backup.pl
chmod 755 virt-backup.pl
yum install perl perl-XML-Simple perl-Sys-Virt
mkdir -p /var/lib/libvirt/backup
#(maybe you want this to be a share mounted from a remote NAS)
/$PATH/$TO/virt-backup.pl --action=dump --vm=VM_NAME --compress=pbzip2
note that I installed bbzip from EPEL to speedup compression and make full use of all server cores: my backups were scheduled during not working hours with the server idling for the most.
@stacksofplates said in KVM - Virt-Manager on a Separate VM:
@dustinb3403 said in KVM - Virt-Manager on a Separate VM:
@jaredbusch said in KVM - Virt-Manager on a Separate VM:
@dustinb3403 said in KVM - Virt-Manager on a Separate VM:
Of course I can just create a directory on the server and then download ISO's directly into it. . .
But I'd rather not. Hrm. . it works, but seems weird.
Well I do not download from the KVM server, I do always have a "iso_store" folder on my KVM server that I have ISO files in.
Sometimes it is a remote share mounted, most of the time it is local to the /root partition.
Yea so what I did is I SSH'd to the server, and ran sudo mkdir /media/iso and then ran wget <url.iso> and it works. But it seems like the wrong way to have to do this. . .
I think that's the way everyone does it.
as @JaredBusch said. wget on local machine then scp to server iso folder (and set that folder as a libvirt storage)
@dustinb3403 said in KVM - Virt-Manager on a Separate VM:
@stacksofplates said in KVM - Virt-Manager on a Separate VM:
did you put in a password for the key encryption?
As Travis said, use ssh-copy-id user@remotehost
Nope, no password when generating the key. Just blank.
The key is copied to the KVM server, and I can ssh into it with just ```ssh '[email protected]'
std config for libvirt doesn't allow non root to operate kvm. you must adjust it either changing the config or generating keys for root and run virt-manager with sudo
@brrabill said in Hyper-V Integrated Services:
So, hyperv-daemons does the following. I am still trying to figure out exactly what hyperv-tools does.
hyperv-daemon:
Suite of daemons for Linux guests running on Hyper-V, consisting of hv_fcopy_daemon, hv_kvp_daemon and hv_vss_daemon.hv_fcopy_daemon provides the file copy service, allowing the host to copy files into the guest.
hv_kvp_daemon provides the key-value pair (KVP) service, allowing the host to get and set the IP networking configuration of the guest. (This requires helper scripts which are not currently included.)
hv_vss_daemon provides the volume shadow copy service (VSS), allowing the host to freeze the guest filesystems while taking a snapshot.
basically the agent requires both kenrel space and userland tools. due to the way linux is distributed you ended up with kernel drivers in place but missing userland.
to understand what userland does try making a backup or snapshot or similar. you can use stuff like an altaro trial : you will see if so called application aware backups are made or not.
this is one of the things which allow hypervisor level tools to interact properly with guests.
not having the proper agent components basically limits this kind of things. also it reduces the introspection of guests, things like view their ip address and so...
this is the list of things provided by the full agent
I've never checked out which part of the agent does what
@brrabill usually centos has external kernel drivers installable by microsoft, ubuntu runs its own set, don't know about fedora.
those are required to make app aware "stuff" possible from hyper-v BUT they aren't enough.
hypervisor searches for its own "agent", which is given by the cited packages. Then the "agent" leverages kernel space drivers to accomplish app aware "stuff".
basically you have more or less recent drivers but you miss the userland stuff that makes it actually work.
Always managed w/out domain in my case so following things could be useless but... Did you enabled winrm both on server and workstation?
Btw you can use gmail via thunderbird or oytlook or any other mua if yiu do not like web interfaces.
We are gsuite customers an we are noticing some issues with really busy accounts. The web interfaces tend to stall but we also use a number of 3rd party extensions to fit our needs.
@dbeato yeah! they used a forked version of minix! best in breed for security auditing 
(I know some Nutanix guys tried it but kept burning out SATA DOMs).
Sata dom? Who the f*** still uses them? Even when I was a c++ coder in automation industry we were phasing out them 3 years ago! Just mainteinance of production stuff.
Btw I see your point. For these applications
MS releases Windows embedded compact only
(Can you even run Hyper-V in a supported, stateless PXE config?)
I think no microsoft product supports pxe. Maybe I'm wrong...
@stacksofplates said in Amazon AWS Leaving Xen for KVM:
@matteo-nunziati said in Amazon AWS Leaving Xen for KVM:
@storageninja said in Amazon AWS Leaving Xen for KVM:
@dashrender said in Amazon AWS Leaving Xen for KVM:
@scottalanmiller said in Amazon AWS Leaving Xen for KVM:
If Hyper-V was Windows, it wouldn't need Windows in the Dom0. It's specifically that it isn't that that is required.
Now I'm lost - Hyper-V still has a Dom0 even when installed as pure Hyper-V?
You never question why for a Hyper-V Core required so much damn install space? The Management VM (DOM0) just runs headless.
TBH if you look at really small partitions maybe Hyper-V requires one of the biggest (but not sure about KVM), anyway my hyper-v install is around 26GB. not a big deal .
Reinstalled in Feb, so there have been some extras added. Plus it was installed with the hypervisor role from the ISO, not minimal and added KVM. So there are a few extras that aren't needed like gluster client, openscap, etc.
But OpenSCAP is helpful on the host because you can scan your VMs directly from the host without the software being in the VM.
With 26gb I mean the partition. Really don't know how much of actual usage. Basically as @Tim_G says I don't care about <30 gb.
@jaredbusch repetedly done on VMs. I install trial and then add serial in this way.
@storageninja said in Amazon AWS Leaving Xen for KVM:
@dashrender said in Amazon AWS Leaving Xen for KVM:
@scottalanmiller said in Amazon AWS Leaving Xen for KVM:
If Hyper-V was Windows, it wouldn't need Windows in the Dom0. It's specifically that it isn't that that is required.
Now I'm lost - Hyper-V still has a Dom0 even when installed as pure Hyper-V?
You never question why for a Hyper-V Core required so much damn install space? The Management VM (DOM0) just runs headless.
TBH if you look at really small partitions maybe Hyper-V requires one of the biggest (but not sure about KVM), anyway my hyper-v install is around 26GB. not a big deal .
