Clone KVM Virtual Machine – How we use it in Linux

Need help to clone KVM Virtual Machine in Linux? We can help you.

Here at Bobcares, we assist our customers with several Linux queries as part of our Server Management Services.

Today, let us see how to do it using the

virt-clone

command.

 

What is virt-clone

virt-clone

is a command-line tool to clone existing virtual machine images that use

libvirt

as a hypervisor management library. First, it will copy the disk images of any existing virtual machine. Then it will define a new guest with an identical virtual hardware configuration.

Now let us proceed to learn how our Support Techs clone KVM Virtual Machine in Linux

 

Clone KVM Virtual Machine

Our Support Engineers suggest to follow the steps below to clone a VM on KVM:

Step 1: Make sure that the VM to clone is off.

We use the command below. Replace “asterisk-cloud” with the VM name.

$ sudo virsh shutdown asterisk-cloud
 
Then we run the below command to get a list of Virtual Machines 
virsh
 manages:
 
$ sudo virsh list –all
Id Name State
—————————————————-
– asterisk-cloud shut off
– instance-00000004 shut off
 
Step 2: Clone the Virtual Machine.
 
To clone 
asterisk-cloud
 virtual Machine to 
kamailio-cloud
 virtual machine, we run:
 
$ sudo virt-clone
–connect=qemu:///system
–original asterisk-cloud
–name kamailio-cloud
–file /var/lib/libvirt/images/kamailio-cloud.qcow2
 
Subsequently, the output will look like this:
 
Allocating ‘kamailio-cloud.qcow2’ | 8.0 GB 00:01:21
Clone ‘kamailio-cloud’ created successfully.
 
If we are connecting to a remote KVM/QEMU Host machine, we put the URL before /system.
 
It will look something like this:
 
$ sudo virt-clone
–connect=qemu://192.168.1.30/system
–original asterisk-cloud
–name kamailio-cloud
–file /var/lib/libvirt/images/kamailio-cloud.qcow2
 
 
asterisk-cloud
: Name of VM cloning from
 
kamailio-cloud
: Name given to resulting VM after cloning
 
kamailio-cloud.qcow2
: Image saved that 
kamailio-cloud
 boots from.
 
 
 
Then we check to confirm that 
kamailio-cloud.qcow2
 file is successfully stored in 
/var/lib/libvirt/images
 folder.
 
$ ls /var/lib/libvirt/images
total 6946188
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 3238789120 Mar 20 17:42 asterisk-cloud.qcow2
-rwxr-xr-x 1 qemu qemu 666894336 Mar 16 04:14 CentOS-7-x86_64-Minimal-1503-01.iso
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 3207331840 Mar 20 17:44 kamailio-cloud.qcow2
 
If we now run the command 
virsh list –all
, we see cloned VM present in the list.
 
$ sudo virsh list –all
Id Name State
—————————————————-
– asterisk-cloud shut off
– instance-00000004 shut off
– kamailio-cloud shut off
 
Before starting the 
kamailio-cloud
, change the channel source mode path from the original.
 
We do this by editing the file 
/etc/libvirt/qemu/kamailio-cloud.xml
 
$ sudo vi /etc/libvirt/qemu/kamailio-cloud.xml
 
Then we look for the line below and change the original domain name to point to the new clone.
 
<channel type=’unix’>
<source mode=’bind’ path=’/var/lib/libvirt/qemu/channel/target/domain-kamailio-cloud/org.qemu.guest_agent.0’/>
 
Original was:
 
<channel type=’unix’>
<source mode=’bind’ path=’/var/lib/libvirt/qemu/channel/target/domain-asterisk-cloud/org.qemu.guest_agent.0’/>
 
Subsequently, to start the cloned virtual Machine, we type:
 
$ sudo virsh start kamailio-cloud –console
 
After logging in, we change 
uuid
 for the network interface. The one on CentOS 7.x Guest machine is eth0.
 
Similarly, to generate a new 
uuid
 for this interface, we type:
 
$ uuidgen eth0
29e28904-c8f6-4ac0-93f0-d5d2cedb8555
 
Original eth0 configuration file from asterisk-cloud VM look like below:
 
TYPE=Ethernet
BOOTPROTO=dhcp
DEFROUTE=yes
IPV4_FAILURE_FATAL=no
IPV6INIT=yes
IPV6_AUTOCONF=yes
IPV6_DEFROUTE=yes
IPV6_FAILURE_FATAL=no
NAME=eth0
UUID=230e87b1-f847-4cab-86b9-df4268a0a0a3
DEVICE=eth0
ONBOOT=yes
PEERDNS=yes
PEERROUTES=yes
IPV6_PEERDNS=yes
IPV6_PEERROUTES=yes
 
Then we change 
uuid
 replacing old with generated one:
 
$ sudo vim /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0
 
On the other hand, we modify the below configurations to fit use cases.
 
TYPE=Ethernet
TYPE=Ethernet
BOOTPROTO=dhcp
DEFROUTE=yes
IPV4_FAILURE_FATAL=no
IPV6INIT=yes
IPV6_AUTOCONF=yes
IPV6_DEFROUTE=yes
IPV6_FAILURE_FATAL=no
NAME=eth0
UUID=29e28904-c8f6-4ac0-93f0-d5d2cedb8555
DEVICE=eth0
ONBOOT=yes
PEERDNS=yes
PEERROUTES=yes
IPV6_PEERDNS=yes
IPV6_PEERROUTES=yes
 
Then we restart network service:
 
$ sudo service network restart
$ sudo systemctl restart network.service
 
[Find it hard to clone KVM? We’d be happy to assist you]
 
 
 
Conclusion
 
To conclude, we learned how to use the 
virt-clone
 command which provides a number of options to clone a KVM VM. Today, we saw an effective method employed by our Support Techs in this regard.
 
  
Related posts:
 
Time Command – How to check execution time in Linux
 
Veeam Backup & Replication KVM | All About
 
KVM Hypervisor Escape | An Introduction
 
Steps to Connect to the Graphical Console for a Guest VM in KVM