sudo virt-install --name fedora40 --os-variant fedora40 --disk /var/lib/libvirt/images/Fedora-Cloud-Base-Generic.x86_64-40-1.14.qcow2 --import --cloud-init root-ssh-key=/home/ayoung/.ssh/id_rsa.pub
I want to call out a stellar article that told me exactly what I needed to do in order to use virt-install and cloud-init to launch a cloud-image. The only thing I have to add is the caveat that the #cloud-config comment at the top of the user-data file is required. The system will ignore the file if it does not start with that comment. This is the easiest way I know to launch a brand new VM.
The following xmllint XPath query will pull out the name of the backing file for a VM named fedora-server-36 and an external snapshot named fedora-36-post-install,
virsh snapshot-dumpxml fedora-server-36 fedora-server-36-post-install | xmllint --xpath "string(//domainsnapshot/disks/disk[@snapshot='external']/source/@file)" - |
The string function extracts the attribute value.
This value can be used in the process of using or deleting the snapshot.
In a recent article, I saw yet another example of using grep to pull information out of xml, and then to manually look for a field. However, XML is structured, and with XPath, we can pull out exactly what we need.
virsh dumpxml fedora-server-36 | xmllint --xpath "//domain/devices/disk[@device='disk']" - |
That will produce output like this:
<disk type="file" device="disk"> <driver name="qemu" type="qcow2" discard="unmap"/> <source file="/var/lib/libvirt/images/fedora-server-36.qcow2"/> <target dev="vda" bus="virtio"/> <address type="pci" domain="0x0000" bus="0x05" slot="0x00" function="0x0"/> </disk> |
Note that I did more in my XPath than required by the original article. I wanted to show an example of querying based on an attribute inside the selected node.
Update: Here is an example for what is done later in the article: pull the path out of the pool xml.
virsh pool-dumpxml default | xmllint --xpath "//pool/target/path/text()" - /var/lib/libvirt/images |
I have a fresh install of Fedora 35 on a lab machine. I want to run a virtual machine on it. I have ssh access to the root account and a public key copied over.
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