Pre-requisite: EWC - OpenStack Command-Line client
Foreword
Before restoring resources in OpenStack, it's important to understand the difference between three primary methods:
- Intance Snapshots (Glance): These capture the entire virtual machine, including the operating system, applications, and configuration. Instance snapshots are useful for cloning VMs, creating templates, or disaster recovery scenarios. They're managed through the Glance service.
- Volume Snapshots (Cinder): These are delta copies of the block storage volumes. Volume snapshots are not full copies and rely on the original volume for restoration, so they are mostly useful for accident recovery. They're managed through the Cinder service.
- Volume Backups (Cinder): These are point-in-time copies of block storage volumes. Volume backups preserve the data within a volume and can be used to restore the volume to the exact state it was in when backed up. They're ideal for data recovery and are managed through the Cinder service.
Choose the appropriate method based on your recovery needs: instance snapshots for full system recovery or replication, volume snapshots for accident prevention and recovery or volume backups for full data security and recovery.
Restoring VMs and Volumes
Restoring VMs from Images
OpenStack provide a mechanism to replace the underlying disk of an existing VM with an image without creating a new VM instance running the following command:
|
where
VM-NAME: The name of the existing VM
IMAGE_ID: Name of the backup image of the VM you created before
Restoring Volume Backups
- To restore a backup to a new volume, first you need to detach the volume from the VM:
- ssh into your VM
- become root
- unmount the volume
sudo umount --verbose <path-to-volume>
- Then you can restore the backup to the volume with OpenStack (from the machine where you are running Openstack commands):
|
Where:
BACKUP_ID: The ID of the backup to restoreVOLUME_ID: The ID of the volume to restore to (must be at least as large as the original volume)
3. Now, you need to attach the volume again to the VM as explained in `Configuring the extra volume in the instance`.
Common use cases
WIP
Backup automation
WIP