Simplest Backup of KVM System With FreePBX as VM

General Help
1

This is more of a general question than a FreePBX question, but my linux experience is really limited to my experience with FreePBX, so I though it best to bother my friends here first.

I have managed to get Centos 6 running with KVM on a Poweredge 2950 with FreePBX, Windows 7 and Ubuntu Server running as virtual machines.

The 2950 is running in a small law office and I want to come up with a simple way to back up the whole server (including the VM images), so that if the 2950 catches on fire or something, I can load Centos on a new machine and restore it in a few hours from an offsite backup.

I’m not worried too much about a bit of data loss (I anticipate a nightly backup) so I don’t think I need to worry about snapshots.

There are a lot of backup options, and I would appreciate advice on a simple (the simpler the better) way to handle my backups. What I envision is a script that copies everything (the entire file system, including the VM images) as a cron job every night at 6 pm to an offsite FreeNAS machine using rsync or some similar copy command.

Is this doable? Or advisable?

If I just tell the 2950 to rsync /* to the FreeNAS box, will it work for me if the 2950 craps out and I need to restore the system from the backed up data on the FreeNAS or is there more to it than that?

Any advice will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance for your assistance.

2

That would depend on what flavor of KVM you installed.

3

I just used the kvm that came with Centos 6 and libvirt and followed the instructions on the Centos wiki.

4

I’m sorry I don’t know which instructions you followed bit if it included

yum install virt-manager

then you can clone the machines from the gui (virt-manager). But more to your question, the machines are defined in xml files (machinename).xml, probably in /etc/libvirt/qemu/ and any disks as (machinename*).img wherever you built them, probably in your home directory, but that would be up to you. You can copy them off site with any tool you care, rsync being a good one, and restore them similarly. The script would be trivial to sync those two directories.