System Restore

[LHammonds]

how did this thread devolve into virtualization from "system restore?"

Well, you mentioned snapshots at the OS level. I talked about snapshots at a hypervisor level above the OS and then the Op started asking direct questions about virtualization.

[MAFoElffen]

From the devolution... TheFu has probably, hands-down the best responses on backing up and taking snapshots of systems. He has lot of good threads and posts on those. I agree with both LHammonds and TheFu on all their posts so far, on that they align with what I have done professionally, working for other people, as an IT Consultant, and personally.

You can do snapshots and backups in many different ways, and at various different levels. As server clusters/mirrors/replications, full system backups and/or imaging, incremental's, dB replications/mirrors/failovers., transaction logs... file system manager snaphshots (lvm, zfs), and virtual host VM snapshots/checkpoints... There is sooooo many ways you can do that.

If "someone" has me come up with their disaster/recovery plan for them (paid), I usually used a combination of "many", to cover them, to get them to a "specific point of time", depending on what they decide is their own acceptable "risk factor" for their business. You can really get down to minute details in that, but the resources and cost of that gets higher with implementing those to the finer details.

On the "devolution"... I also moved away from Centrix and Xen based solutons around 2014-2016. I try not to mention them now. I still support KVM (and KVM derivatives), Hyper-V, vSphere/ESXi... But the only one that is really open on hardware right now is KVM. Both VMware... and "now" the current and future releases of Hyper-V (2019 on) are hardware specific and getting very picky about the hardware they support as being certified. VMware even more so, as it will refuse to install to what they consider what it will run on. Microsoft is moving to that also... On what it will install to.

And hardware that is being certified for "cloud flavors" is getting very picky now also. Especially if for Azure and/or VMware Cloud solutions. (Except for KVM). Amazon AWS moved from being XEN to KVM based... I beta test and verify system/features for Insider Win Server, VMware vSphere/vCenter(includes ESXi), and KVM. Currently testing Win Server 2022, vSphere 7.2 and KVM 6.1.

Just a note of agreement and compliance with those above. Commercially, it boils down to what your company needs to get back to, and what they can pay licenses/support for that. For KVM, Canonical has great commercial support, and is less than RedHat, SUSE, Oracle, etc. Commercial is just another animal... concerning licensing and support. It just is.

Personally, I have a preference for Ubuntu and Canonical. I have been on their Server team since 2012. There is a lot of things that get resolved, right here, in Ubuntu. (Or get pointed out as upstream bugs, that this is wrong and not how it should be.) That is not bragging. It is just how it is. I am very proud of being a small part of that, in some way.