Cloning KVM snapshots

If you ever work with Virtual Machines, you will definitely come across Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM).

The focus of this article is cloning Snapshots to another VM, this is something I've been trying to do via the Virtual Manager GUI but there is no direct way.

I tried multiple articles but they all resulted in the following error,
"Device 'libvirt-2-format' does not have the requested snapshot"

I finally came over a stackoverflow question that showed how to do it, the key to all of this seems to be
virt-sysrep.

What is virt-sysrep?
=> virt-sysprep - Reset, unconfigure or 
customize a virtual machine
so clones can be made

Let's get started.

To begin you would need to first generate a XML definition using the following command

virt-clone --original $Source_VM_Name  --name $Destination_VM_Name  --file /var/lib/libvirt/images/$Destination_VM_Name.qcow2  --print-xml > $Destination_VM_Name.xml

After that you copy the qcow2 image

cp --progress  /var/lib/libvirt/images/centos8.qcow2 /var/lib/libvirt/images/centos8-mig.qcow2

Now for the most important command, virt-sysrep.

virt-sysprep -a $Destination_VM_Name.qcow2

In my case virt-sysrep was failing that is because the latest version file-5.40-2 introduced some bugs due to which virt-sysrep would fail, I had to downgrade using the packages cached

pacman  -U /var/cache/pacman/pkg/file-5.39-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst

We'll use the xml file generated in step file in order to define the destination machine using a virsh command:
virsh define $Destination_VM_Name.xml

Once you've done the above its time for some work. Depending on the number of snapshots you have this could get tiring you can use sed to automate this.

$ virsh snapshot-list $Source_VM_Name --tree
snapshot1
  |
  +- snapshot2
      |
      +- snapshot3

Note: You need to restore the snapshots starting from the root then go to the leaf.

For each snapshot do this.

virsh snapshot-dumpxml $Source_VM_Name $Snapshot_Name --security-info > Snapshot_Name.xml

Can be automated like this

virsh snapshot-list $Source_VM_Name |sed -e '1,2d' -e '/^$/d'|cut -d' ' -f2| while read -r line; do virsh snapshot-dumpxml $Source_VM_Name --snapshotname $line --security-info > "${line}.xml" ;done

We need to change the UUID and domain name in the snapshot xml definition.

Fire up your command line fu and edit the files

vim Snapshot_Name.xml

Change(This will come up twice)

<domain type='kvm'>
  <name>$Source_VM_Name</name>
  <uuid>$Source_UUID<uuid>

to

<domain type='kvm'>
  <name>$Destination_VM_Name</name>
  <uuid>$Destination_UUID<uuid>

Also change the MAC Address field to the destination MAC Address(This will come up twice):

<mac address='$Destination_MACADDRESS'/>

And change the backing disk file to the destination disk file:

<source file='/var/lib/libvirt/images/$Destination_VM_Name.qcow2'/>

Time to redefine the snapshot.

virsh snapshot-create $Destination_VM_Name Snapshot_Name.xml --redefine

That's it you should be able to see the snapshots in the Virtual Machine Gui or via the command line.

Reference: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/43456433/how-to-keepimport-kvm-snapshots-after-virt-clone-a-vm

Thank you for reading!