Questions about storage

[Blake McBride]

Thanks, Cole.

I hope that putting all of the files associated with a particular VM in one
place and allowing that to be specified in one unique directory would be a
high priority.  Without it, backing up and moving a VM becomes too
unwieldy, risky, and just a needless hassle.

Thanks.

Blake


On Wed, Aug 9, 2023 at 8:12 AM Cole Robinson <crobinso at redhat.com> wrote:

> On 8/8/23 9:47 PM, Blake McBride wrote:
> > Greetings,
> >
> > I make pretty regular use of VMs on my Linux box.  I've used KVM,
> > VirtualBox, and VMWare.  I'd like to make more use of KVM/virt-manager
> > but I am having a number of problems using virt-manager.  I'm pretty
> > sure the problem is me.  I just need to understand it more.  I think all
> > of my questions are about storage.  I hope someone on this list can help
> > me.  Here are my questions:
> >
> > 1.  Is there any way of escaping the whole "storage pool" concept?  I'd
> > like to just specify a directory to put my files in rather than needing
> > to creating a pool each time.  Likewise for the ISO I use to gen the
> > system.  I want to be able to simply browse my disk and select the ISO.
> >
>
> In the storage browser UI, there's the button to `browse local` which
> opens a native file browser, which kinda escapes the pool UI. But no,
> there's not a simple UI way to create a new directory for each VM.
> virt-manager and libvirt convention is to place all VM disk images in
> one directory. Straying from that requires more config and UI clicks
>
> > 2.  I need all of the files associated with a particular VM in one
> > independent place so I can back it up and move it as a unit easily.
> > This includes the cow2 file and all of the VM meta information files.
> >
>
> No unfortunately this is not easy to do with libvirt. XML and disk
> images are never in the same place, UEFI variables are somewhere else,
> TPM state is yet another place, etc. And I don't know of a tool that
> simplifies moving all these details. Maybe some virt-v2v invocation can
> do it.
>
> - Cole
>
>
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