2016-12-12, 15:06:10
Hello Shazoom,
Thanks for the questions.
You are correct that there is no quiesce IO option in VMware Fusion, I specifically looked for that and there's no such option when making snapshots. You are also correct in assuming that Vimalin uses VMware Fusion's snapshots for providing backups from live virtual machines.
Even while there is no additional quiesce option, it is however just as safe as rolling back a snapshot or using suspend is with VMware Fusion right now.
The backup process does not just save the disk file from before the snapshot, it also saves all the snapshot data that contains the memory. So as long as you restore the backup on the same host (or a host with the same processor) you have the same reliability as with normal snapshots. On restoring you get back to the state of suspend, eg. it looks as if the VM was suspended and you can continue from there.
If you restore to a host with a different processor, then in the worst case scenario you would have a crash consistent backup, eg. comparable to as if you pulled the power cord on a running machine.
While that is not 100% ideal, the loss of data is still minimal unless you are running a high transaction database on the VM and even then there's a fair chance that the transaction logs will be able to minimize the damage.
Most people would run such a VM on VMware vSphere and not VMware Fusion.
There's already a feature request on adding an option to automatically shutdown/backup/restore for such type of servers that I will look into once we get past the beta phase.
For your second question. The application depends on vmrun for its API to interface with VMware Fusion.
Hope this helps a bit, I'll see if I can get a better answer from VMware on the quiescence part.
--
Wil
Thanks for the questions.
You are correct that there is no quiesce IO option in VMware Fusion, I specifically looked for that and there's no such option when making snapshots. You are also correct in assuming that Vimalin uses VMware Fusion's snapshots for providing backups from live virtual machines.
Even while there is no additional quiesce option, it is however just as safe as rolling back a snapshot or using suspend is with VMware Fusion right now.
The backup process does not just save the disk file from before the snapshot, it also saves all the snapshot data that contains the memory. So as long as you restore the backup on the same host (or a host with the same processor) you have the same reliability as with normal snapshots. On restoring you get back to the state of suspend, eg. it looks as if the VM was suspended and you can continue from there.
If you restore to a host with a different processor, then in the worst case scenario you would have a crash consistent backup, eg. comparable to as if you pulled the power cord on a running machine.
While that is not 100% ideal, the loss of data is still minimal unless you are running a high transaction database on the VM and even then there's a fair chance that the transaction logs will be able to minimize the damage.
Most people would run such a VM on VMware vSphere and not VMware Fusion.
There's already a feature request on adding an option to automatically shutdown/backup/restore for such type of servers that I will look into once we get past the beta phase.
For your second question. The application depends on vmrun for its API to interface with VMware Fusion.
Hope this helps a bit, I'll see if I can get a better answer from VMware on the quiescence part.
--
Wil