Automating Scheduled VM Snapshots

Rackspace OpenStack Flex and vanilla OpenStack intentionally keep compute (Nova), image storage (Glance) and block storage (Cinder) as separate, focused services. Automated, policy-driven scheduling of instance snapshots crosses service boundaries and can lead to questions around consistency, storage backends, tenancy/billing, scale, and operator policy. Because those concerns vary widely between clouds, operators have generally preferred to provide scheduling as an optional, out-of-band feature (cron jobs, operator tooling, or a dedicated backup product) instead of baking a one-size-fits-all scheduler into Nova.

We've written a blog post on our Rackspace Cloud blog that shows exactly how to set up an automated snapshotting service running on a tiny VM that allows for the management and retention of scheduled snapshots of your VMs without any touch other than setting up your configuration. Check out that blog post here!