Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server Cookbook

Backing up your VM metadata

While a KVM stores some of the resources' configuration on the disk in a human readable format, it is a good idea to query libvirt for the configuration of your resources.

How to do it…

In this recipe we'll back up all relevant KVM metadata by performing the following steps:

Here's the network configuration:

~]# for i in $(virsh net-list --all | sed -e '1,2d' |awk '{print $1}'); do \
    virsh net-dumpxml --network $i --inactive > /tmp/net-$i.xml; \
done

Here's the storage configuration:

~]# for i in $(virsh pool-list --all | sed -e '1,2d' |awk '{print $1}'); do \
    for j in $(virsh vol-list --pool $i |sed -e '1,2d') | awk '{print $1}'; do \
        virsh vol-dumpxml --pool $i --vol $j > /tmp/vol-$j.xml; \
    done \
 virsh pool-dumpxml ...