Backup with USB passthru workaround?

jensolsson.se

Hi

I have a development machine on xcp-ng, and I had to use Bluetooth for a project so I enabled USB passthru in order to access the Bluetooth device on the machine.

I also in another project have a couple of modems connected to a VM on VMWare ESXi.

None of these would require constant access to the hardware. It would be perfectly OK to disable USB passthru while doing backups and I am sure there are other users who have a similar need.

Would it be possible to add a setting in Backup. "Disable USB passthru if required" I am thinkink then that USB passthru could be disabled during backup and then enabled again.

Kind regards
Jens

olivierlambert

I think there's already an issue around, to understand why a VM with passthrough can't be snapshot.

marcungeschikts

Indeed it is in our backlog : USB passthrough with snapshots
and we will need to groom it (study it) before starting development.

jensolsson.se

@olivierlambert @marcungeschikts I saw in the recent release notes that it should be possible but that it will shut down and start the vm again? Did I dream this or did I understand it right?
My VM with USB is still not backing up, maybe there is a setting somewhere I need to enable?

Kind regards
Jens

olivierlambert

You need to be on latest XOA release channel.

The only condition is to have an "offline snapshot" enabled for this backup job (shutdown the VM, unplug the vUSB device, snapshot, re-attach the device, start the VM).

jensolsson.se

@olivierlambert Thanks @olivierlambert it did indeed work well!
I did not know I had to create a separate backup job, thought I could set it on one VM in the existing backup job, but I now understand the setup

olivierlambert

Yeah, "offline" backup is for the whole job, so if you don't want to have your other VMs stopped for the snapshot, you can have a dedicated "offline" job while keeping "normal" for the rest

But at least now you can do those backup for vUSB enabled VMs!

jensolsson.se

@olivierlambert Yes this is really great. I have a windows box where I experiment with bluetooth a bit and having backup on this machine at least once a week or so feels very good I think
I think it also makes sense that a machine that needs to be taken down in order to make backup also probably will need another backup schedule.