[virt-tools-list] virt-v2v questions

[Kenneth Armstrong]

Are you saying just back up the contents of the VM itself or back up
the VM as a whole?  I'd like to find a way to just give the VM a
proper name (I'll look into virt-inspector, thanks for that) and copy
the logical volumes that make up the VM disks onto an external media.
Of course, I would have to use something else at a later time to
import the VM's back into RHEV or a KVM server later should I need to,
but for now I would like to get them off of my export storage domain
and store them in a more portable format than what RHEV does.

Thanks again.

On Tue, Nov 2, 2010 at 8:45 AM, Richard W.M. Jones <rjones at redhat.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 02, 2010 at 08:36:17AM -0400, Kenneth Armstrong wrote:
>> I have an export storage domain that I have exported a VM to.
>> Supposedly, according to the RHEV documentation, it is exported as an
>> OVF format.  However, it creates the disk images as logical volumes on
>> the export domain, with GUID's instead of easy to understand names.
>> What I am attempting to do is find a way to use virt-v2v to pull the
>> VM off of my export storage domain and convert it into a KVM VM to
>> store on an external hard drive as another layer of backup.
>
> For a backup, you shouldn't use virt-v2v because (a) it won't work --
> it's meaningless to v2v from KVM to KVM and (b) if it does work it's
> bound to break or reconfigure your guest in some way that you don't
> want.
>
> Now you can find out what your disk images contain easily enough using
> virt-inspector:
>
>  http://libguestfs.org/virt-inspector.1.html
>
> or perhaps by trying to extract the hostname:
>
>  https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2010/10/01/tip-get-the-hostname-of-a-guest/#content
>
> or some other distinctive feature of the guest:
>
>  https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2010/10/30/tip-use-augeas-to-get-the-default-boot-kernel-for-a-vm/#content
>
> Then you can just back up the content of those LVs as-is.
>
> Rich.
>
> --
> Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
> virt-p2v converts physical machines to virtual machines.  Boot with a
> live CD or over the network (PXE) and turn machines into Xen guests.
> http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-p2v
>