I am running Win 10 in a virtual machine under Fedora 30. I now need to do a clean install of Fedora 32. It is critical that the virtual machine survives this install.
The default location of virtual machines is under /var/lib/libvirt, which will will be run over by installation. Because of this, I now created a new pool onto a logical volume that will survive fresh OS install and used virt-clone to clone the virtual machine onto this logical volume. The cloned virtual machine is running just fine.
I can see that in the logical volume where the clone is the only file is the .qcow2-file containing the cloned virtual machine. I have two questions:
.qcow2-file carries over? Or do I need to copy other information from some other directory?virt-manager about the pool that already exists and the virtual machine that is located there?You also need to at least copy the guest XML configuration files, which are stored under sub-dirs of /etc/libvirt.
If you've stored other things like snapshots, further dirs under /var/lib/libvirt may need to be preserved.
If you save the XML files somewhere, then in the new install "virsh define $XMLFILE" will load the guest into libvirt, such that virt-manager will see it again. You can use virt-manager's storage management UI to tell it about the pool.