Installation guide

Dell Inc.

KVM Virtualization in RHEL 6 Made Easy

1. Suspend the VM to be cloned. This is a requirement since it ensures that all data and network I/O

on the VM is stopped.

# virsh suspend vm1

2. Run the virt-clone command:

# virt-clone \

--connect qemu:///system \

--original vm1 \

--name vm1-clone \

--file /vm-images/vm1-clone.img

This operation will take 2-3 minutes, depending on the size of the VM.

3. When done, you can resume the original VM:

# virsh resume vm1

4. The cloned VM is placed in shutdown mode. To start it:

# virsh start vm1-clone

The cloned VM is an exact copy of the original VM, all VM properties (VCPUs, memory, disk space) and

disk contents will be the same. The virt-clone command takes care to generate a new MAC address for

the VM clone and updates the proper network controller configuration file (i.e.

/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-em1), thus avoiding duplicate MAC addresses.

For more information, refer to the virt-clone man page.

5. Managing VMs

These are some of the commands I use to administer my VMs, and to be honest I don‟t use them very

often, but they can be handy. As always, for a list of all available commands, your best bet is the virsh

man page.

5.1 Common tasks

List all VMs on a host, running or otherwise:

# virsh list –all

Show VM information:

# virsh dominfo vm1

Show VCPU/memory usage for all running VMs: