Update July 2021: I have seen errors with external snapshots of volumes on versions of QEMU/KVM/libvirt from Ubuntu 20 Focal. Adding note on using internal snapshot on volume backed by qcow2. Internal snapshots created on QEMU copy-on-write (qcow2) disks are the most commonly used snapshot when using libvirt. It is easy to see why; … KVM: creating and reverting libvirt external snapshots
The ability to quickly stand up a guest OS with cloud-init is most often associated with deployment of virtual machines in an IaaS like EC2 or Azure. But cloud-init is not just for remote cloud providers, and using cloud-init for local images that can be quickly deployed in KVM works great for local development and … KVM: Testing cloud-init locally using KVM for a RHEL cloud image
The ability to quickly stand up a guest OS with cloud-init is most often associated with deployment of virtual machines in an IaaS like EC2 or Azure. But cloud-init is not just for remote cloud providers, and using cloud-init for local images that can be quickly deployed in KVM works great for local development and … KVM: Testing cloud-init locally using KVM for a CentOS cloud image
The ability to quickly stand up a guest OS with cloud-init is most often associated with deployment of virtual machines in an IaaS like EC2 or Azure. But cloud-init is not just for remote cloud providers, and using cloud-init for local images that can be quickly deployed in KVM works great for local development and … KVM: Testing cloud-init locally using KVM for an Ubuntu cloud image
If you need KVM to bring up a full guest OS as quickly as possible, consider preparing a base disk image that can be used as the basis for any number of linked clones by using a backing file. This article is related to a previous article, “Cloning and fixing an Ubuntu host using KVM“. … KVM: Implementing linked clones with a backing file
Many developers like to use Vagrant from HashiCorp to standardize the workflow of virtual machines: creation, running, destroying, taking snapshots, etc.. Usually Vagrant is used for Linux hosts, but it also works with Windows as long as you prepare the template properly. In a previous article I went over the detailed steps to create a template image for … Windows: Windows 2012 Sysprep for Vagrant readiness