virt-manager upgrade

[Daniel P. Berrangé]

On Fri, Oct 07, 2022 at 10:21:18AM +0100, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 06, 2022 at 07:14:39PM +0000, woodcab wrote:
> > Hello,
> > 
> >  Still new to Linux and had a few questions regarding upgrading to 4.1.0
> >
> >  I'm using virt-manager 2.2.1 on Ubuntu MATE 20.4. There is an
> > upgrade available for Ubuntu Mate to MATE 20.4.1. I am told that
> > this is a minor upgrade and that it can be done with my files in
> > place. I have backed up my files and VMs along with the .xml
> > files. My question is how to best proceed with that upgrade? If
> > virt-manager is upgraded to 4.1.0 in the process, will my VMs that
> > were setup in 2.2.1 still work in 4.1.0? Or should I upgrade
> > virt-manager to an intermediate version before going to 4.1.0?
> 
> I don't think I've ever had to worry about existing VMs when upgrading
> libvirt or virt-manager (BTW I think *libvirt* is more relevant to
> this since that's what is actually managing the VMs).  I have upgraded
> libvirt many times on my system that runs VMs even while the VMs were
> running.

Libvirt goes to quite alot of trouble to ensure you can upgrade
the host software stack and not cause problems to your VMs. You
can even upgrade libvirt itself, while QEMU VMs are running,
and it should seemlessly reconnect.

Upgrading virt-manger itself will not have any impact of VMs,
since virt-manager is merely a GUI frontend.

Downgrading software, however, is totally unsupported, and you
get to keep any pieces & put it back together if it breaks :-)

> Since you've done the right thing by backing up the existing VMs and
> *.xml files, you should be good even in the unlikely case that
> anything goes wrong during the upgrade, so I guess go for it!

With regards,
Daniel
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