kvm-vm-clone

This is a command-line tool written in Go for cloning KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) virtual machines. It uses virt-clone to create a copy of an existing VM and virt-customize to set the hostname of the newly cloned VM.

Features

• Clone an existing KVM virtual machine
• Automatically set the hostname of the cloned VM
• Check if the source VM is running before attempting to clone

Prerequisites

Before you can use this tool, ensure you have the following installed on your system:

• KVM and related tools (virt-clone, virt-customize, virsh)
• sudo privileges (the tool uses sudo to run KVM commands)

Installation

Build the tool:

$ go build

Usage

To use the tool, run it with the following command-line arguments:

$ kvm-vm-clone --source source_vm_name --dest new_vm_name

Clone VM Example:

$ kvm-vm-clone --source ubuntu-vm --dest ubuntu-vm-clone

Clone VM without changing hostname (for FreeBSD or other unsupported OSes):

$ kvm-vm-clone --source freebsd-vm --dest freebsd-vm-clone --no-hostname-change

Process

The tool performs the following steps:

1. Checks if all required commands are available (sudo, virt-clone, virt-customize, virsh)
2. Verifies that the source VM is not currently running
3. Clones the source VM using virt-clone
4. Sets the hostname of the new VM using virt-customize

Notes

• The tool requires sudo privileges to run KVM commands. Make sure you have the necessary permissions.
• The source VM must be stopped before cloning. The tool will check this and fail if the VM is running.
• The cloned VM will have its hostname set to the name specified by the --dest argument.
• If a VM with the destination name already exists, the cloning process will fail.
• The tool uses virsh list to check the VM state, which makes it locale-independent and more robust.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE for details.