Re: guest .img files

From: Cole Robinson <crobinso@redhat.com>
To: Kenni Lund <kenni@kelu.dk>
Cc: Lynn Wilborn <lynn@hotrodpc.com>, kvm@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: guest .img files
Date: Mon, 19 Oct 2009 09:55:10 -0400	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <4ADC6FBE.5080906@redhat.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <3b1f68ef0910171552g7d7357b9nb189942d5f1bec61@mail.gmail.com>

On 10/17/2009 06:52 PM, Kenni Lund wrote:
> 2009/10/17 Lynn Wilborn <lynn@hotrodpc.com>:
>> I have a windows 2003 server guest that's been registered
>> with MS, and it probably won't let me do that many more
>> times. So I want to save the guest, erase fedora, and
>> install centos 5.4 when it comes out.
> 
> I don't know if this always is the case, but I've done several
> reinstallations of Windows 2003
> and if it won't accept your legal serial, you'll get the option to
> phone your local MS department
> and they'll reactivate it so you'll be able to install it on "new hardware".
> 
>> Im told I can just copy the .img file of the guest to a
>> network share to back it up, but is there anything I would
>> need to do to have the virt-manager gui on the new OS see it
>> and list it when I copy it back? Does it need to be imported
>> in some way?
> 

You should just be able to do:

Original host: virsh dumpxml <vmname> > vmname.xml
New host     : virsh define vmname.xml

Assuming any files referenced in the XML are in the same location on the
new host.

For a more generic way to import an existing image, you can use

virt-install --import ...

Which allows building a new XML config with all of virt-install's flags.

> I don't know if there's a fancier way, but I did it some time ago
> myself; just backup the image
> and the corresponding libvirt XML configuration file from
> /etc/libvirt/qemu/ (or something like
> that, I don't have access to a Fedora machine at the moment) and copy
> it back on the new
> machine. Now restart the libvirtd daemon, to make it load the
> XML-files and start up virt-manager.
> 
> FYI: This is a bit off topic as it is not really related to KVM, a
> better place to ask virt-manager
> questions would be at the fedora-virt mailing list;
> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-virt
> 

Just to clarify, for virt-manager/virt-install issues in general (not
specifically fedora related), virt-tools-list is also available:

https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/virt-tools-list

Thanks,
Cole