Re: [sheflug] windows virtual server

[Alex Hudson <home [at] xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 2006-06-19 at 11:58 +0100, David Willington wrote:
> I'm setting up moodle for a school. The test site is running on a LAMP
> server quite happily, but it's been suggested by the technicians that
> the production server could run on a LAMP server within windows virtual
> server, the advantage being that they can take snapshots of the LAMP
> server for backup purposes without having to get involved with the LAMP
> server itself.

I'm going to give a slightly different answer to everyone else - while I
think the idea of running VM Linux on Windows is utterly k00k, I
question the premise also.

Will snapshotting a virtual harddisk work? I'm not sure. You're running
something on a database. The database is going to make you few
guarantees about what's actually on disk at any given time, so when you
take a snapshot of the disk it could basically be mush which isn't much
use in a restore. You'd get the machine back, but not necessarily the
data.

(I presume that's what they're talking about - obviously if you could
snapshot disk + RAM + everything else, that would work, but I'm thinking
that's not what's on the table).

To backup _any_ kind of database, you have to ask the database to do it.
It's the same with MySQL, SQL Server, any of them. 

I think the better idea is to actually think about the different
solutions that are available. Obviously, they want backups, quite
reasonably. They also don't want to have to rely on Linux skills to do
that as far as possible. I think there are other ways - e.g., Samba or
rsync to backup disk contents? Apps like phpmyadmin, or the MySQL client
(does it run on w32? I'm not sure) can be used to take db dumps. 

Cheers,

Alex.


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