Copy Guest From Another System?
I have what I thought was a simple question but I cannot find an answer after searching the web for most of the morning. My goal is to copy a KVM Guest to another system. Both systems are running KVM under RedHat 5.5 Server on similar hardware (x86 64-bit). The guest is running RedHat as well, but it could also be running Windows Server 2008. It takes most of a couple days to install and setup software on the original guest. Instead of duplicating that effort each time I need a new server, I would like to simply copy (clone, export/import) the original, then update the system name and IP Address once it has been copied. This strategy works quite well when using VMWare for virtualization. They provide a tool to copy an image from one host to another. Once at the target I bring up the copy and fix up name and address. In a couple of hours (most of which is the tool copying data across the network) I have two systems running the application set. Our team wants to support both VMWare to KVM, that's why I need the technique to copy images to another server when on KVM. KVM must have a way to do what is quite easy in VMWare. Any pointers to the instructions?
Thanks!
Dave Wall
Did you think about using a LVM volume for the data of the guest and copy the LVM volume? That way you would get a copy of the guest and after that you could alter some files and copy the config to start the guest. It should be doable I think.
This guide should have what you need:
http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/13/html/Virtualization_Guide/...
Dave,
You can also use the virt-install command to do an import if you have copied over the disk image. Here's an example of
one from my host:
sudo virt-install --name acce1 --ram=1024 --os-type=windows --os-variant=win2k3 --hvm --virt-type=kvm --import --disk=/kvm/images/rmtDC-clone.img --network bridge=virbr0
There's some help on virt-install by simply typing virt-install --help at the terminal.
Dan H.
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