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
: Name of VM cloning fromasterisk-cloud
: Name given to resulting VM after cloningkamailio-cloud
: Image saved thatkamailio-cloud.qcow2
boots from.kamailio-cloud
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.
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