Cloning LXC LVM Containers

After a hiatus from blogging, I am back at it. I recently found out about Linux Containers(LXC)[LXC - Sourceforge]. Linux Containers are very similar to FreeBSD jails or Solaris Zones. They allow virtualization using a shared kernel, which means that there is very little overhead compared to other virtualization options.

With LXC, you can use Linux’s Logical Volume Management(LVM)[LVM HOWTO]. LVM allows you to do things like change partition size as neeed, make snapshots of a partition, do hot-swapping with multiple drives, or software RAID capabilities. In particular for this article, I am going to focus on the LVM Snapshot feature.

LVM Snapshots use a technique called copy-onwrite, so when you create a snapshot of a logical volume, LVM doesn’t copy all the data from the logical volume into the snapshot, but rather LVM creates a mapping of deltas, or changes that have happened to the initial logical volume, and then in essence unplays those in the snapshot. Everytime you make a change to the original logical volume, it gets written to the original volume, and then to each snapshot. Original LVM Snapshots were read only, and were initially created so that you could back up your main logical volume from the snapshot, knowing that the snapshot wouldn’t have changes happening to it while you were making a backup of it. With the current version of LVM, Snapshots are now Read-Write This means that you can treat LVM snapshots as a full working copy of the original logical volume, but you will still have the performance hit of writing to the snapshot and the original logical volume everytime a change in the original volume is made.

Using LVM as the container for your LXC instances allows you to do immediate cloning, as it creates an LVM snapshot. This is great for instances where your original logical volume won’t change much, but if both the snapshot and original volume are in active use, you will get hit with writing to the Snapshot whenever either change. Unfortunately with the current implementation of LXC cloning when using an LVM base is that it only supports snapshotting of the original volume, and not a true clone. You can get this same outcome with just a few extra steps though(Warning, the following commands assume knowledge of LXC and LVM commands).

lxc-start -n original_copy -d
#Create a snapshot clone of the LXC lxc-clone -s -L 3G -o original -n original_copy

#These commands are to set up the static IP address I want used in the LXC

vim /var/lib/lxc/original_copy/config 

mkdir /mnt/lvm_fs

mount /dev/lxc/original_copy /mnt/lvm_fs/

vim /mnt/lvm_fs/etc/network/interfaces 

umount /mnt/lvm_fs/

#Set up LXC to start on system boot

ln -s /var/lib/lxc/original_copy/config /etc/lxc/auto/original_copy

#Create a full Logical Volume that you will copy the snapshot data to.

lvcreate --size 3GB --name original_copy_tmp lxc # 3GB was the size of my initial lv

# can also do this over the network "dd if=/dev/lxc/original_copy | pv -ptrb | ssh user@hostname of=/dev/lxc/original_copy_tmp "(Thanks to https://github.com/mpalmer/lvmsync )
dd if=/dev/lxc/original_copy of=/dev/lxc/original_copy_tmp 

#Switch the names and clean up the snapshot

lvrename /dev/lxc/original_copy /dev/lxc/original_copy_old

lvrename /dev/lxc/original_copy_tmp /dev/lxc/original_copy

#Start your LXC using the full new Logical Volume

lxc-start -n original_copy -d

Let me know if there are any cool tips or tricks you know with LXC or LVM.