psyphi.net blog

With a little bit of shell-scripting I made this. It runs on a dom0 and scans through virtual machines running on a cluster, requesting snapshots of each one. You may want to use vm-snapshot-with-quiesce if it’s supported by xen-tools on your domU machines.

for i in `xe vm-list params=name-label | grep name | awk '{print $NF}' | xargs echo`; do echo $i; xe vm-snapshot vm=$i new-name-label="$i-`date +'%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S'`"; done

If you cron the above script every day then after a few days you may want to start deleting the oldest snapshots:

for i in `xe vm-list params=name-label | grep name | awk '{print $NF}'`; do snapshot=`xe vm-list name-label=$i params=snapshots | awk '{print $NF}'`; echo "$i earliest snapshot is $snapshot"; if [ "$snapshot" ]; then xe vm-uninstall vm=$snapshot force=true; fi; done