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 <crobi...@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 > >
