Questions about storage

[Blake McBride]

Thanks, Cameron.

It seems, for the most part, I can accomplish what I desire.  The problem
is all of the added steps that are unnecessary with the other VM vendors.
We're not talking about one extra step.  We're talking about a bunch of
extra steps.  Is there a benefit to all of these (really unnecessary) steps?

Thanks.

Blake


On Thu, Aug 10, 2023 at 3:40 PM Cameron Showalter <
cameronsplaze222 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I'm trying to learn libvirt, and this surprised me. With #2, would it work
> to just use virsh? You can use `virsh dumpxml` to save the vm settings, and
> a similar command for the qcow2 storage. Then `virsh define` to restore the
> vm on a different machine. IIRC one of the points of libvirt is you don't
> want to touch the underlying files directly anyways, instead use tools like
> virsh so that the permissions are managed automatically. Plus with this,
> all you need is the VM and volume names, not their paths. Is the problem
> that UEFI and TPM variables aren't kept in the xml itself? I haven't had to
> touch those yet.
>
> Thanks!
>
>
> On Wed, Aug 9, 2023 at 6:40 AM Blake McBride <blake1024 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> 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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