Can I use tape drive with XEN VPS / Guest oses?

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Q. I’ve CentOS 5.0 server running XEN kernel. VPS Guest is Linux distribution. How do I use tape drive with XEP Guest os?

A. You can’t use character devices such as tape drives in Xen guests. This is limitation of Xen. It doesn’t have the ability to export character devices to multiple guests oses.

However for backup you can use rsync or ftp server or NAS server.

Posted by: Vivek Gite

The author is the creator of nixCraft and a seasoned sysadmin, DevOps engineer, and a trainer for the Linux operating system/Unix shell scripting. Get the latest tutorials on SysAdmin, Linux/Unix and open source topics via RSS/XML feed or weekly email newsletter.

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  1. This is not, strictly speaking, true.

    Xen, if running in HVM mode, has the ability to export pci devices to specific domU’s. You could, then, export a (physical) scsi controller pci device to a domU; then, use it as you normally would.

    Or, perhaps rmt is for you (the remote tape device).

  3. rsync -a --delete --exclude=/dev --exclude=/sys --exclude=/proc --exclude=/tmp remoteserver.example.com:/ /path/to/backup/destination/

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