Backup and Restore Strategies

Installing Bacula Client on Each Guest

This strategy works by installing a Bacula Enterprise File Daemon on every virtual machine as if they were regular, physical clients. In order to optimize the I/O usage of Openstack, the user will use Bacula’s Schedules, Priorities, and Maximum Concurrent Jobs to spread backup jobs over the backup window. Since all VMs could use the same storage on the Openstack hypervisor, running all backup jobs at the same time could create a bottleneck on the disk/network subsystem since Bacula will walk through all filesystems to open/read/close/stat files.

Installing the Bacula Enterprise File Daemon on each virtual machine permits to manage virtual servers like physical servers and also to use all Bacula Enterprise’s features such as:

Quick restores of individual files
Checksum of individual files for Virus and Spyware detection
Verify Jobs
File/Directory exclusion (such as swap or temporary files)
File level compression
Accurate backups.

Cinder Driver Backup with Openstack Plugin

With the Cinder driver strategy, the Bacula Enterprise Openstack-VM will save all Openstack volume`s at the raw level, in the Openstack context.

Bacula’s Openstack-VM plugin will read and save the content of Openstack instance using Cinder backup API.

Cinder allows the user to integrate various storage solutions into the Openstack cloud. It does this by providing a stable interface for hardware providers to write drivers that allow the usage of Cinder volumes backup capabilities.