I’ve been asked a few times if it would be possible to use virtnbdbackup as some kind of “replication” utility, to keep cold standby virtual machines on other libvirt hosts. Usually i would tell to use underlying filesystem features (such a…
If you take backups using the proxmox-backup-client and you wondered what backup may include a specific file, the only way to find out is to mount the backup and search for the files. For regular file backups, the Proxmox Backup Server fron…
SLES 16 has been released. In the past, SUSE offered ready built vagrant images. Unfortunately that’s not the case anymore, as with more recent SLES15 releases the official images were gone. In the past, it was possible to clone existing pr…
The latest Proxmox release introduces a new Qemu machine version that seems to behave differently for how it addresses the virtual disk configuration. Also, the regular “query-block” qmp command doesn’t list the created bitmaps as usual. If…
It’s no news that the vagrant license has changed while ago, which resulted in less motivation to maintain it in Debian (understandably). Unfortunately this means there are currently no official vagrant images for Debian trixie, for reasons…
The new Proxmox release advertises a new feature for easier snapshot handling of virtual machines whose disks are stored on LVM volumes, I wondered.. whats the deal..? To be able to use the new feature, you need to enable a special flag for…
Skimming through the latest libvirt releases, to my surprise, i found that latest versions (>= v10.10.0) have added support for the QCOW data-file setting. Usually the incremental backup feature using bitmaps was limited to qcow2 based imag…
I’ve released qmpbackup 0.46 which now utilizes the image fleecing technique for backup. Usually, during backup, Qemu will use a so called copy-before-write filter so that data for new guest writes is sent to the backup target first, the gu…
I re-implemented the proxmox backup nbdkit plugin in C. It seems golang shared libraries don’t play well with programs that fork(). As a result, the Plugin was only usable if nbdkit was run in foreground mode (-f), making it impossible to u…
nbdkit is a really powerful NBD toolkit. Lately, i wanted to access VM backups from a Proxmox Backup Server via network (not by using the proxmox-backup-client map function..) For example, to test-boot a virtual machine snapshot directly fr…
Yesterday i released a new version of virtnbdbackup with a nice improvement. The new version can now detect zeroed regions in the bitmaps by comparing the block regions against the state within the base bitmap during incremental backup. Thi…
A few days ago i found this mail on the LKML that introduces support for userspace access to LVM thin provisioned metadata snapshots. I didn’t know this is possible. Using the thin provisioning tools you can then export the metadata informa…