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It is important to take regular backups of the oVirt Engine if there is a failure. While PowerFlex snapshots are an available option, oVirt offers a simple CLI tool, engine-backup, that dumps the engine to a single file which can be used for various restore operations. In fact, if backups are not taken regularly, OVM warns the user in the event log with the following message: “There is no full backup available, please run engine-backup to prevent data loss in case of corruption.”
The engine-backup utility is not installed by default, even on an oVirt node, but it is readily available in the repository. It does, however, require PostgreSQL. Follow these steps to install the utility:
dnf install -y https://download.postgresql.org/pub/repos/yum/reporpms/EL-8-x86_64/pgdg-redhat-repo-latest.noarch.rpm
dnf -qy module disable postgresql
dnf install -y postgresql12-server
yum install ovirt-engine-tools-backup
Once installed, take a full backup of the environment. Although there are many options for backing up using the utility, including adding config files, the simplest operation is to run a full backup, ensuring everything is added. It is best to save the backup file to a location off the hosted engine server. In this environment, a separate PowerFlex NFS mount, engine_backup, is used for this purpose.
Run the following command as root, modifying the file locations:
engine-backup --scope=all --mode=backup --file=/engine_backup/engine_backup_1-18-2024 --log=/engine_backup/engine_backup.log
The backup runs quickly. The results are shown in Figure 61.
Dell Technologies recommends taking regular backups to ensure restore capabilities.