[katello-devel] Have folks used virsh save and restore?

[Jeff Weiss]

On Thu, 2011-07-28 at 21:08 -0400, Bryan Kearney wrote:
> On 07/28/2011 08:54 PM, James Slagle wrote:
> > On Thu, Jul 28, 2011 at 05:05:17PM -0400, Bryan Kearney wrote:
> >> I am doing a bunch of re-installs, and every time I use vish save
> >> and virh restore the image ends up having ext errors. I am using
> >> qemu with raw files.
> >>
> >
> > I think save/restore only save the memory of the vm.  You can probably do what
> > you want with the snapshot-create/snapshot-revert commands, however you must
> > be using the qcow2 format.
> >
> 
> 
> Bah.. I misread the doco. I will try snapshots tomorrow.
> 

LVM also does what you are looking for.  I generally use LVM partitions
as VM disks, because they can be snapshotted (or themselves a snapshot).

That lets you clone vms and the snapshot partition can be much smaller
than the original (because it only needs to hold the delta).  It also
lets you roll back by throwing away the snapshot and creating a fresh
one. 

I wrote a wiki page on it here:

https://wiki.idm.lab.bos.redhat.com/export/idmwiki/JBossON_QA_-_UsingKVM

HTH,

Jeff