How to Backup VMs Metadata in Citrix Xenserver

This article describes how to back up metadata for an individual Virtual Machines on Citrix Xen Servers. In this article you will get step by step instructions for backing up metadata. Also at end of this article there is a small shell script which can be used for backup metadata for all VMs running on current xen server.

1. Steps to Backup VMs Metadata in Citrix Xenserver

1.1. Find VMs UUID

Use the following command to get list of UUIDs of all vms along with other details. this UUID will be used in next steps.

# xe vm-list is-control-domain=false is-a-snapshot=false

uuid ( RO)           : 8ac95696-94f3-83c1-bc89-8bb2603f832b
     name-label ( RW): test-vm
    power-state ( RO): running

As per above output test-vm uuid is “8ac95696-94f3-83c1-bc89-8bb2603f832b“.

1.2. Backup Metadata using UUID

After getting UUID of vm, use following command to backup metadata of virtual machine with uuid 8ac95696-94f3-83c1-bc89-8bb2603f832b and create metadata backup file metadata.bak.

# xe vm-export filename=metadata.bak uuid=8ac95696-94f3-83c1-bc89-8bb2603f832b metadata=true

You have completed vm metadata backup successfully.

2. Script for Backup All VMs Metadata

This is a good option to schedule metadata backup regularly. You can schedule the below script for backup all the vms metadata on current xen server.

How to use script:

2.1 – Copy this script to a file /scripts/metadata-backup.sh in xenserver.

2.2 – This script is using remote backup server mounted using nfs, You can replace this with your own settings.

2.3 – Execute this script using sh /scripts/metadata-backup.sh.

2.4 – For regular backup schedule this in systems crontab. [Crontab Examples]

#!/bin/bash

DATE=$(date +%d%B%y)
XSNAME=`echo $HOSTNAME`
mkdir -p /mnt

mount -F nfs 192.168.10.100:/backup/citrix/metadata /mnt

BACKUPPATH=/mnt/$XSNAME/$DATE
mkdir -p $BACKUPPATH

xe vm-list is-control-domain=false is-a-snapshot=false | grep uuid | cut -d":" -f2 >  /tmp/uuids.txt

while read line
do
    VMNAME=`xe vm-list uuid=$line | grep name-label | cut -d":" -f2 | sed 's/^ *//g'`
    xe vm-export filename="$BACKUPPATH/$XSNAME-$VMNAME-$DATE" uuid=$line metadata=true
done < /tmp/uuids.txt
umount /mnt