Xen Orchestra 4.3

Olivier Lambert

• 2 min read

Welcome to the "Summer" release of XO, with a powerful backup feature for XenServer! You can now schedule a full export of yours VMs to a NFS share (or local filesystem), directly from the web interface!

Schedule full backup

After our first step toward XenServer backups, with scheduling rolling snapshots, here is a new one: full VM export, with a scheduler AND to a NFS share. That's a clear step toward Disaster Recovery.

That's why we'll use the XVA format in the first place: it contains all the VM metadata (name, RAM, vCPUs, networks, disk configuration...) + all the VM data (disks). And by compressing by default, the file size will be at worst of the currently used disk space, not more (often less).

And because we can export to a remote share (NFS), even if your complete infrastructure is destroyed, you can restore everything by a simple VM import!

In order to achieve this goal, you need two things:

  • an export scheduler
  • a mount point manager

Let's explore the possibilities with a "classical" scenario: you want to automatically export your critical VMs in a remote NFS share (in another site), every Sunday at 1:00 AM. All of this with a maximum of 4 backup files per VMs.

You can do it in few clicks now, as you can see in this video:

You'll have:

  • all the designated VMs fully exported every Sunday at 1:00 AM
  • with a maximum of 4 exports (the old one is removed automatically)
  • thus, a full backup for one month
  • everything stored on a distant NFS share

This is perfect for a disaster recovery strategy: even if you lost your main site and all your XenServer hosts, no problem! You just have to import your XVA files in your brand new infrastructure and it works out of the box! (XVA files contain data AND metadata).

For sure, you can imagine other scenarios:

  • schedule few exports for non-critical VMs, with a depth of 1
  • schedule every night backups with 7 files depths for vital VMs
  • and so forth!

Bug fixes

We also take some time to fix subtle bugs, read the change log for more details.

Automated testing

Since one month, we got an intern working on automated tests for xo-server. Thanks to Mylène, we are now covering a lot of features! For those who want to know, we are using Mocha and Must.

Upgrade!

Just use the embedded upgrade process in the XO interface. Nothing else to do :) Refresh your browser after the update, to be sure you got the last version.

WARNING: for those willing to use remote NFS mounts for backup, please run this command in XOA as root: apt-get install nfs-common. Otherwise, you couldn't mount any NFS share.

NOTE: all new XOA posted since this release (4.3) have the NFS package.