guest .img files
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.
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?
Someone mentioned some sort of xml file is needed for the image for virt-manager. Any suggestions?
Thanks!
2009/10/17 Lynn Wilborn <[email protected]>:
Quoted 4 lines
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".
Quoted 5 lines
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?
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
Best Regards
Kenni Lund
Quoted 6 lines · Kenni Lund
2009/10/17 Lynn Wilborn <[email protected]>:
Quoted 4 lines
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.
Quoted 12 lines
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".Quoted 5 lines
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.
Quoted 9 lines
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.
Quoted 5 lines
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