Citrix Systems 6 VM Protection and Recovery, Coping with machine failures

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VSS snap of volumes hosted on dynamic disks in the Windows Guest : The vm-snapshot-with-quiesce CLI and the

XenServer VSS hardware provider do not support snapshots of volumes hosted on dynamic disks on the Windows

VM.

Note:

Using EqualLogic or NetApp storage requires a Citrix XenServer Advanced Edition or higher

license. To learn more about XenServer editions, and to find out how to upgrade, visit the

Citrix website here.

Note:

Do not forget to install the Xen VSS provider in the Windows guest in order to support VSS.

This is done using the install-XenProvider.cmd script provided with the Windows PV

drivers. More details can be found in the Virtual Machine Installation Guide in the Windows

section.

VM Protection and Recovery

Note:

VM Protection and Recovery requires a Citrix XenServer Platinum Edition. To learn more about

XenServer editions and to find out how to upgrade, visit the Citrix web site here.

XenServer's VM Protection and Recovery (VMPR) feature provides a simple backup and restore utility for your

critical service VMs. Regular scheduled snapshots are taken automatically and can be used to restore VMs in case

of disaster. Scheduled snapshots can also be automatically archived to a remote CIFS or NFS share, providing an

additional level of security.

VM Protection and Recovery works by having pool-wide VM protection policies that define snapshot schedules

for selected VMs in the pool. When a policy is enabled, snapshots are taken of the specified VMs at the scheduled

time each hour, day or week, and, if configured, the snapshots can also be archived automatically. Several policies

may be enabled in a pool, covering different VMs and with different schedules.

Note:

A VM can only be assigned to one VMPR policy at a time.

When using VMPR, the following naming convention for archive folders and their contents applies. The archive

folder name combines the VM name and the first 16 characters of the VM UUID. For example:

If the VM name = Win7_Test_1, and the VM UUID = cb53200c-bbd8-4c12-a076-e2eb29b38f06

then the archive folder is named Win7_Test_1-cb53200c-bbd8-4c.

This folder contains archived VM files, in the YYYYMMDD-HHMM.xva form. For example:

20100624-1830.xva

20100625-1830.xva

For more information on using VM Protection and Recovery, please see the XenCenter online help.

Coping with machine failures

This section provides details of how to recover from various failure scenarios. All failure recovery scenarios require

the use of one or more of the backup types listed in the section called “Backing Up and Restoring XenServer

Hosts and VMs”.