Complete backup of Linux install

[Michael Torrie]

On Mon, 2005-11-21 at 14:30 -0700, Kenneth Burgener wrote:
> Gabriel Gunderson wrote:
> > Main site:
> > http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/SRG/netos/xen/
> > 
> > You could do a file backed VM and make snapshots of the file as you need
> > to.  Restoring a whole system would be as easy as `cp sys1.backup sys1`.
> > Ubiquitous Xen is going to make things sweet for sysadmins.
> > 
> > Gabe
> 
> That is a very interesting idea.  Is there a significant performance 
> loss running the VM?

Yes.  About 1% overhead.  Also if you use disk images, you take another
hit, since all disk access has to pass through an extra layer (the host
file system).  In a real cluster this wouldn't be an issue since all
storage would come off of a NAS system via iSCSI or fiber channel (which
can be ported directly into the VM).

Michael

> 
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Michael Torrie <torriem at chem.byu.edu>