Daniel Erez

How to run virtual machines in oVirt without copying their disks.

Have you ever wanted to run your virtual machine in oVirt without copying its hugh disks? Tired of checking the slow transfer progress? We did, and we have a good plan to avoid the wait!

In this talk we show how oVirt can start virtual machine without copying the disks, using external disk via NBD or other protocols supported by qemu. Once the virtual machine is running, copy the disks in the background to oVirt storage. This minimizes downtime to seconds instead of minutes, and can be used in many scenarios such as importing virtual machines from other systems (even from foreign systems via virt-v2v), previewing backups before restore, and provisioning a virtual machines.

Audience: Virtualization administrators or developers interested in oVirt architecture and would like a peek into future development.

Do you need to go back in time to restore data from important VMs? oVirt does not provide a time machine yet, but you can build one using oVirt backup APIs.

Building on changed blocks tracking in qemu, and upcoming libvirt backup API, oVirt will provide API to perform incremental backups. You will be able to back up VMs more efficiently, downloading only changed blocks. Incremental backup will be simpler and more reliable, not requiring creating and deleting snapshots. Uploading will support on-the-fly conversion from raw to qcow2 when restoring disks.

In this talk we will travel into the future, introducing the oVirt incremental backup API for starting and ending backups, and the ovirt-imageio API for downloading changed blocks. Finally, we will travel back to the past, and show how to restore raw guest data into new disks.

Audience: Backup vendors and virtualization developers, interested in utilizing incremental backup API. Also, oVirt administrators and users interested in peeking into the future of oVirt.

Session summary: Peek into the future of oVirt backup API.

Do you need to go back in time to restore data from important VMs? oVirt does not provide a time machine yet, but you can build one using oVirt backup APIs.

Building on changed blocks tracking in qemu, and upcoming libvirt backup API, oVirt will provide API to perform incremental backups. You will be able to back up VMs more efficiently, downloading only changed blocks. Incremental backup will be simpler and more reliable, not requiring creating and deleting snapshots. Uploading will support on-the-fly conversion from raw to qcow2 when restoring disks.

In this talk we will travel into the future, introducing the oVirt incremental backup API for starting and ending backups, and the ovirt-imageio API for downloading changed blocks. Finally, we will travel back to the past, and show how to restore raw guest data into new disks.

Audience: Backup vendors and virtualization developers, interested in utilizing incremental backup API. Also, oVirt administrators and users interested in peeking into the future of oVirt.

Session summary: Peek into the future of oVirt backup API.