[libvirt-users] Clone VM with saved state

[Kashyap Chamarthy]

On Mon, Apr 11, 2016 at 12:01:08PM +0300, Michael Ravits wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> My use case involves creating duplicates of saved virtual machines.

While I realize you want to trivially clone VMs with some state at
random point in time, you might want to look into `virt-builder` about
cloning VMs.  It has some sensible advice:

    http://libguestfs.org/virt-builder.1.html#clones

Using `virt-builder` to clone images, will 'sysprep' the images, which
will ensure that (a) each VM copy gets a fresh pair of SSH host keys;
(b) a new random seed; (c) all security/sensitive information is
removed; (d) log files are cleaned (in the below URL, look up the string
"logfiles *" to see what all it removes), and much more.   Take a look
here for what all it does:

    http://libguestfs.org/virt-sysprep.1.html#operations
    http://libguestfs.org/virt-sysprep.1.html#security  

> Tried with virt-manager and with virsh but so far it seems like this
> case is not supported by these tools.  Does anyone know how I could
> achieve the above?

With 'virsh', you _can_ save the live disk and memory state:

    $ virsh snapshot-create-as \
        --domain myvm snap1 \
        --diskspec vda,file=./disk-snap.qcow2,snapshot=external \
        --memspec file=./mem-snap.qcow2,snapshot=external \
        --atomic


-- 
/kashyap