Linux – How to create a dupe of a KVM/libvirt/virt-manager VM

kvmlibvirtlinux

I'm a bit lost with virt-manager / libvirt / KVM.

I've got a working KVM VM (Windows XP) which works nicely.

The VM is backed by a 4GB file or so (a .img).

Now I want to do something very simple: I want to duplicate my VM.

I thought "OK, no problem, let's copy the 4GB file and copy the XML" file.

But then the libvirt FAQ states in all uppercase: "you SHOULD NOT CARE WHERE THE XML IS STORED"

libvirt FAQ

OK fine, I shouldn't care. But then how do I duplicate my VM?

I want to create a new VM that is a copy of that VM.

Best Answer

virsh will allow your to edit, export, and import the XML definition for your servers. I would use virt-clone to generate a cloned image file, and export the XML. To be safe I would remove the clone configuration from the original server.

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The user libvirt-qemu must be capable of accessing the directory /home/penzo/Scaricati/, not just the file within.

Linux – Setting umask of libvirt/virt-manager for proper permissions in a directory shared by host and guest

I realize this is a very old post but I just recently solved this exact problem by submitting patches to libvirt. Starting in libvirt v6.10, you'll be able to specify the "fmode" and "dmode" options on 9pfs shares which control the default host permissions on files and directories, respectively.

If you can't run v6.10, I found a workaround using the qemu:commandline feature of libvirt's XML domain to pass the raw QEMU flags. I wrote a blog post about how to do this but the quick version is to put something like

<commandline xmlns="http://libvirt.org/schemas/domain/qemu/1.0">
  <arg value="-fsdev"/>
  <arg value="local,security_model=mapped,id=fsdev-fs0,path=/path/to/share,fmode=0644,dmode=0755"/>
  <arg value="-device"/>
  <arg value="virtio-9p-pci,id=fs0,fsdev=fsdev-fs0,mount_tag=sharename,bus=pci.6,addr=0x0"/>
</commandline>

into your domain XML as a child of "domain." The blog post goes into more detail about the values but you may need to tweak fsdev-fs0, fs0, and sharename to fit your domain.

Best Answer

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KVM can’t access iso o raw images outside /var/lib/libvirt/images

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