virt-clone(1)

NAME

virt-clone - clone existing virtual machine images

SYNOPSIS

virt-clone [OPTION]...

DESCRIPTION

virt-clone is a command line tool for cloning existing virtual machine images using the "libvirt" hypervisor management library. It will copy the disk images of any existing virtual machine, and define a new guest with an identical virtual hardware configuration. Elements which
require uniqueness will be updated to avoid a clash between old and new guests.

Given suitable command line arguments, "virt-clone" is capable of
running completely unattended, with the guest 'kickstarting' itself
too. This allows for easy automation of guest installs. A companion
tool "virt-clone(1)" is provided for cloning pre-existing guests if
their installation cannot be easily automated from pristine media.

OPTIONS

Any of the options can be omitted, in which case "virt-clone" will run interactively prompting for input as required.

-h, --help: Show the help message and exit
-o ORIGINAL_GUEST, --original=ORIGINAL_GUEST: Name or uuid for the original guest to be cloned. This guest must
be shut off since it is not possible to safely clone active guests at this time.
-n NAME, --name=NAME: Name of the new guest virtual machine instance. This must be unique amongst all guests known to the hypervisor on this machine,
including those not currently active. To re-define an existing
guest, use the virsh(1) tool to shut it down & delete it prior to
running "virt-clone". This parameter will be prompted for if
omitted on the command line.
-u UUID, --uuid=UUID: UUID for the guest; if none is given a random UUID will be
generated. If you specify UUID, you should use a 32-digit
hexadecimal number. UUID are intended to be unique across the
entire data center, and indeed world. Bear this in mind if manually specifying a UUID
-f DISKFILE, --file=DISKFILE: Path to the file, disk partition, or logical volume to use as the
backing store for the new guest's virtual disk. If the original
guest has multiple disks, this parameter must be repeated multiple times, once per disk in the original virtual machine.
-m MAC, --mac=MAC: Fixed MAC address for the guest; If this parameter is omitted, or
the value "RANDOM" is specified a suitable address will be randomly generated. For Xen virtual machines it is required that the first 3 pairs in the MAC address be the sequence '00:16:3e', while for QEMU or KVM virtual machines it must be '54:52:00'.
--connect=CONNECT Connect to hypervisor with URI: Connect to a non-default hypervisor. The default connection is
chosen based on the following rules:; xen If running on a host with the Xen kernel (checks against
/proc/xen); qemu:///system
If running on a bare metal kernel as root; qemu:///session
If running on a bare metal kernel as non-root; It is only necessary to provide the "--connect" argument if this
default prioritization is incorrect, eg if wanting to use QEMU
while on a Xen kernel.
-d, --debug: Print debugging information to the terminal when running the
install process. The debugging information is also stored in
"$HOME/.virtinst/virt-clone.log" even if this parameter is omitted.
--force: Prevent interactive prompts. If the intended prompt was a yes/no
prompt, always say yes. For any other prompts, the application will exit.

EXAMPLES

Clone the guest called "demo" which has a single disk to copy: # virt-clone \
--original demo \
--name newdemo \
--file /var/lib/xen/images/newdemo.img; Clone a QEMU guest with multiple disks

# virt-clone \
--connect qemu:///system \
--original demo \
--name newdemo \
--file /var/lib/xen/images/newdemo.img \
--file /var/lib/xen/images/newdata.img

Clone a guest to a physical device which is at least as big as the
original guests disks. If the destination device is bigger, the new
guest can do a filesystem resize when it boots.

# virt-clone \
--connect qemu:///system \
--name demo \
--file /dev/HostVG/DemoVM \
--mac 54:52:00:34:11:54

AUTHOR

Written by Kazuki Mizushima, and a team of many other contributors. See the AUTHORS file in the source distribution for the complete list of
credits.

BUGS

Report bugs to the mailing list
"http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/et-mgmt-tools" or directly to
BugZilla "http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/" against the "Fedora"
product, and the "python-virtinst" component.

COPYRIGHT

Copyright (C) Fujitsu Limited 2007, and various contributors. This is free software. You may redistribute copies of it under the terms of the GNU General Public License "http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html".
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.

docs.sk

comprehensive documentation repository

See also