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Creating snapshots in Xen with Linux commands

A virtual machine snapshot is a great feature, freezing the current state of a virtual machine. Unfortunately, open source Xen doesn't offer support for snapshots -- but Linux does. Since open source Xen always uses Linux as its privileged domain, you can use Linux commands to create snapshots.

Byte-by-byte snapshot
One way of making snapshots in Xen is by using Linux dd after saving the current state of a virtual machine. This would involve the following steps:

  1. Use the xm save command to disable the current state of a virtual machine and write it to a disk file. This would write the machine state only to a file, not the current state that is used in the Xen disk files or partitions. To do this for a domain with the name linux01, use xm save linux01 linux01.sav. Take note that this command stops the virtual machine.
  2. Now dump the current state of the disk image files to a backup file using dd. The following example would do this for LVM logical volumes used by Xen:
    dd if=/dev/xenvols/linux01_root of=/data/xen_linux01_root.img
  3. Restart the virtual machine using the xm restore command.

The major disadvantage of this solution is time. The dd command makes a byte-by-byte copy of the virtual machine disk file and that can take an incredibly long time. Therefore, this option may not be very practical.

The LVM method
In Linux, the Logical Volume Manager (LVM) can also be used for creating a snapshot, one that takes significantly less time than the previous disk file method. This method implies that your virtual machine uses an LVM logical volume as its storage back-end, as opposed to using a virtual disk file. For this logical volume, you next need to create a snapshot. This snapshot is a kind of backup that contains metadata and blocks that have changed from the moment that you took the snapshot only. The trick is that when you use dd to make a copy of the snapshot via the metadata,

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you'll always make a snapshot of the original blocks on the original volume without the need to de-activate the original volume as well. By working this way, you can reduce the time it takes to create a snapshot of the virtual machine drastically. The procedure is as follows:

  1. Use the xm save command to save the current state of the virtual machine and write it to a disk file:
    xm save linux01 linux01.sav
  2. Assuming that you already have an LVM logical volume that is used as the storage back-end for your virtual machine, use the following command to make a snapshot of this volume. A good guideline is to use 10% of the allocated disk space in the original logical volume as the size to use for the snapshot volume:

  3. lvcreate -s -L 1G -n linux01-snap /dev/xenvols/linux01
  4. Since you've now saved the state of your virtual machine in the LVM snapshot, you can restart the virtual machine, reducing the down time of the virtual machine dramatically as compared to the method sketched above:
    xm restore linux01-sav
  5. Use dd to create the snapshot of the virtual machine and write it to an image file. This will take longer since by using the snapshot you will copy all the disk blocks that are allocated by the virtual machine:
    dd if=/dev/xenvols/linux01-snap of=/data/xen01.img
  6. Don't forget to remove the snapshot in the last step of this procedure. This is important because a snapshot that stays around will eventually fill up completely and when that happens the snapshot will be disabled. The problem with this is that it will prevent you from remounting the original volume as well, so don't forget to apply this last step:
    lvremove /dev/xenvols/linux01-snap

While no Linux distribution offers a solution in the open source Xen stack to create a virtual machine snapshot as of yet, you've read how you can do it anyway by using standard Linux tools such as LVM and dd.

About the author: Sander van Vugt is an author and independent technical trainer, specializing in Linux since 1994. Vugt is also a technical consultant for high availability (HA) clustering and performance optimization, as well as an expert on SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 (SLED 10) administration.


This was first published in April 2008

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