Images and Snapshots
Images
You can create images from virtual machines. An image contains a complete data information of a virtual machine. You can use images to quickly replicate corresponding resources.
ZSphere provides protection for image integrity and security:
- Images use encryption algorithms to protect integrity. When an image is downloaded from the image storage to a data storage, it must pass encryption algorithm verification. The download only proceeds if the verification is successful.
- Image files are stored in slices in the image storage. The sliced image files must be reassembled by ZSphere before you can read their specific content, thereby ensuring the image data security.
Snapshots
You can create snapshots for virtual machines. A snapshot is essentially a data state file of a disk at a specific time. Before performing important operations, creating a snapshot for a virtual machine can retain the data state (including the memory state) at that specific time, facilitating quick rollback in case of failures. For long-term backup, it is recommended that you use the backup service.
The snapshot feature is applied in the following scenarios:
- Quick Failure Recovery: If an unexpected failure occurs in the production environment, you can use snapshot rollback to return quickly to a known state.
- Data Development: By creating snapshots of production data, you can acquire near real-time authentic production data for applications such as data mining, report query, and development testing.
- Improve Operation Fault Tolerance: Before major operations such as system upgrades or business data migration, we recommend that you create one or more snapshots. If any problem occurs during the upgrade or migration process, you can use snapshots to restore the normal system data state in time.