Back to the future Incremental backup in oVirt

by Eyal Shenitzky and Daniel Erez

At: FOSDEM 2020

Do you need to go back in time to restore data from important VMs? oVirt
does not provide a time machine yet, but you can build one using oVirt
backup APIs.

Building on changed blocks tracking in qemu, and upcoming libvirt backup
API, oVirt will provide API to perform incremental backups. You will be
able to back up VMs more efficiently, downloading only changed blocks.
Incremental backup will be simpler and more reliable, not requiring
creating and deleting snapshots. Uploading will support on-the-fly
conversion from raw to qcow2 when restoring disks.

In this talk we will travel into the future, introducing the oVirt
incremental backup API for starting and ending backups, and the
ovirt-imageio API for downloading changed blocks. Finally, we will travel
back to the past, and show how to restore raw guest data into new disks.

Audience:
Backup vendors and virtualization developers, interested in utilizing
incremental backup API. Also, oVirt administrators and users interested in
peeking into the future of oVirt.

Session summary:
Peek into the future of oVirt backup API.
Do you need to go back in time to restore data from important VMs? oVirt
does not provide a time machine yet, but you can build one using oVirt
backup APIs.

Building on changed blocks tracking in qemu, and upcoming libvirt backup
API, oVirt will provide API to perform incremental backups. You will be
able to back up VMs more efficiently, downloading only changed blocks.
Incremental backup will be simpler and more reliable, not requiring
creating and deleting snapshots. Uploading will support on-the-fly
conversion from raw to qcow2 when restoring disks.

In this talk we will travel into the future, introducing the oVirt
incremental backup API for starting and ending backups, and the
ovirt-imageio API for downloading changed blocks. Finally, we will travel
back to the past, and show how to restore raw guest data into new disks.

Audience:
Backup vendors and virtualization developers, interested in utilizing
incremental backup API. Also, oVirt administrators and users interested in
peeking into the future of oVirt.

Session summary:
Peek into the future of oVirt backup API.

Room: H.1309 (Van Rijn)
Scheduled start: 2020-02-02 14:00:00