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I am looking into a backup solution, it will run on a virtual machine located at our KVM-host. The question is wether it is best to use a LVM-volume on the host and mount that with NFS into the guest backup machine or wether to use a big disk image.

What good and bad with the solutions? What is the best practice?

nenne
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  • Which hypervisor are you using? Hyper-V or VMware? Do you have a separate storage network, or are you sharing storage IO with general network access? – dunxd Sep 20 '10 at 10:36
  • Its a pretty basic setup, Proxmox is the system which uses KVM as the hypervisor. The files will be on the VM host at a seperate disk from the system files. Its a simple 1 machine setup. Not to fancy. I dont know wheter to use a big raw image as a virtual hard drive for the backup guest or use NFS and mount it through host-guest network. There will be no network traffic as it uses the virtual interface. Proxmox is basicly a Debian 5 with virtualization tools and custom kernel. – nenne Sep 20 '10 at 10:44

2 Answers2

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If you don't need to share the contents with the host, I'd make two lvm volumes on the host and give them both to the guest. Preferably using virtio.

That would be the fastest option, rather than files-over-NFS or image-over-NFS

Joris
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I would keep the backup volume separate from the virtual machine and mount via NFS. You won't lose any performance going over NFS.