Syncing Open Vms


alatteri

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Hello,

 

I have about 30 virtual machine running thru VirtualBox.  About 25 are small disk footprint (3-4 gigs), with very light load.  They sit there serving up very static data.  They could go months without any change at all.  

The others have more frequent changes and a larger disk footprint (~10 gigs).

 

I would like to have these synced to other backup VM hosts.  Problem is, that BTsync won't update as long as the VM is running.  I previously used Rsync cron jobs to do this, and it would transfer everything fine, even if the VM was running, I could boot the copies on other hosts no problem.  If I go with BTsync, I will have to power down, wait for sync finish, then power up again to make sure all my copies are the latest.

 

Any thoughts?  The root of the problem, is how do I sync always in use large files?

 

Thanks,
Alan

Edited by alatteri
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Hey there.

 

What you're trying to do is not possible because btsync does not synchronize a certain file as long as there is an open file lock to this file.

You could switch your file system to one that allows snapshots. ZFS does, Btrs does as well.

Then you can configure btsync to synchronize those snapshots instead of the original data. Then you can trigger the "take snapshot" mechanism of the file system which renders btsync to synchronize data.

 

Having btsync to synchronize write-opened files most likely will never be implemented.

 

Regards,

Stephan.

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Hey there.

 

Here is another idea. You could expose your VMs storage folder by NFS on one side and mount that NFS share to the very same host computer on the other. That should break the boundaries of file system locks. If you restrict this NFS to localhost only I gues that doesn't cost your lots of performance.

 

Regards,

Stephan.

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