Due to a ransomware attack, the wiki was reverted to a July 2022 version. . We apologize for the lack of a more recent valid backup.
Much of the state in an ONOS cluster is stored on disk in the ONOS data directories. Often times, users want a way to migrate, update, or upgrade a node without losing its state. ONOS provides two scripts to help aid in that process:
Backing up a node
Prior to backing up a node, ensure the ONOS instance has been shutdown. To backup the persistent state of a node, users can use the onos-backup script packaged in the ONOS distribution. This script is a simple helper that creates a tarball containing all the node's persistent state. Simply run onos-backup, and by default the script will create an onos-data.tar.gz file outside the root ONOS directory.
Note: prior to calling the onos-backup script, you may need to ensure your $ONOS_HOME environment variable is set.
Restoring a node from backup
To restore the state of a node, ONOS provides the onos-restore script. This script takes a tarball created by the onos-backup script described above and unpacks it to the appropriate ONOS data directories. Once a node's state has been restored, it can be restarted with the same state.
To restore a node's persistent state, simply run the onos-restore script, pointing to the tarball created by the backup. Note again that your $ONOS_HOME environment variable should be set.
Caveats
The backup and restore mechanisms provided with ONOS can be useful for restoring the state of an existing node or performing an offline upgrade of a node. ONOS guarantees that the persistent state of a version n node will be compatible with version n+1 nodes (until semantic versioning is implemented). However, there are some caveats to keep in mind when using this feature. Most notably, in order for an ONOS controller node to be migrated between hosts - backed up on one host and restored on another - the cluster should be configured with named nodes. Many ONOS configurations substitute the host IP as a node name in the cluster configuration. However, nodes can also be identified by arbitrary unique names. It is recommended that ONOS cluster nodes be configured with unique names rather than simple IP addresses if the backup/restore feature will be used to migrate a node between hosts.