Big milestone for XO backup

XOA is able to backup your XenServer VMs since 2014. But we added many features, step by step, until we faced a wall: we needed to redesign it to improve current capabilities. But also to deliver new exciting features!

Once upon a time…

XOA backup story started 3 years ago: we managed to have scheduled jobs to export full VMs, on a "remote" (eg: NFS storage). Then, we added Disaster recovery: instead of "remote" target, we allowed to use a distant XenServer host (in fact, a SR). In this case, your recovery time was reduced to 0.

Then came Delta backup! To be fair, "Continuous Delta backup", because after the first full, you never had to make other full. And finally, Continuous Replication was the logical following (it's the "DR of full backup" applied to delta)

A new ambition

But this is just a start, and more possibilities are coming:

• get more info on the backup process, with the ability to cancel it
• improved backup logs/reports (like transfer vs merge speed)
• fine grained concurrency to allow faster multiple backups
• multiple schedule job (eg: daily and monthly)
• multiple remotes (eg: to stream backup at 2 different places)
• job retry (don't skip directly to the next schedule)

And also brand new things would be doable, like:

• XOA proxies for backup: ability to keep backup stream in a remote site
• Cloud backup: send your backups in our cloud for disaster recovery

That's a LOT of new stuff! And a brand new backup code is required to achieve it. That's why we started to work on it few months ago. We hope now that this revamped code will turn into actual features for our next release. Which ones? You'll know it soon, stay in touch!