Managing Virtual Machine Backups
A regular backing up of the existing virtual machines is essential for any physical server reliability. In Parallels Server for Mac Bare Metal Edition, you can use the pctl backup and pctl restore commands to back up and restore your virtual machines.
Note: You can also use the pbackup and prestore utilities to back up and restore your virtual machines.
Creating a backup
The pctl backup command allows you to create virtual machine backups on both local and remote physical servers. For example, to make a full backup of the MyVM virtual machine residing on the local server and save it on the destination physical server with the IP address of 10.10.100.1 , run the following command:
# pctl backup MyVM -s root:1qaz2wsx@10.10.100.1
root:1qaz2wsx before the destination server IP address denotes the root credentials used to log in to this server. If you do not specify these credentials, you will be asked to do so during the command execution.
Restoring a backup
To restore a backup of a virtual machine, you can use the pctl restore command. This command supports restoring backups to a local Parallels server only. For example, to restore a backup of the MyVM virtual machine stored on the remote server with the IP address of 10.10.100.1 , you can run this command on the local server:
# pctl restore MyVM -s root:1qaz2wsx@10.10.100.1
If you have two or more backups of the MyVM virtual machine, you can use the pctl backup-list command to find out the ID assigned to a specific backup:
# pctl backup-list -s 10.10.100.1
ID Backup_ID Node Date Type
{e3c8be4a-2955-4242-93f6-2fb68a433de1} {7a5e7605-a467-4e04-9f5f-6f0078b5f9f5} dhcp-10.10.100.1.parallels.com 2009-08-21 10:10:32 f
{e3c8be4a-2955-4242-93f6-2fb68a433de1} {24a3011c-092e-4f21-bb3b-29ccfe967e92} dhcp-10.10.100.1.parallels.com 2009-08-21 11:12:35 f
You can now indicate the found ID after the -t option to tell pctl backup to restore a particular backup. For example, to restore the backup that was created first, execute this command:
# pctl restore -t {7a5e7605-a467-4e04-9f5f-6f0078b5f9f5} -s root:1qaz2wsx@10.10.100.1
|