Offline migration using the virsh command and local image

Performing offline migration with virsh does not require a shared storage; however, we are responsible for providing the guest filesystem to the new host (by coping the image file and so on). The offline migration transfers the instance definition without starting the guest on the destination host and without stopping it on the source host. In this recipe, we are going to perform an offline migration using the virsh command on a running KVM guest using an image file for its filesystem.

Getting ready

For this simple recipe, we are going to need the following:

• Two libvirt hosts and a running KVM instance. If one is not present on your host, you can install and start a new guest VM using a local image file:

root@kvm:~# virt-install --name kvm_no_sharedfs --ram 1024 --extra-args="text console=tty0 utf8 console=ttyS0,115200" --graphics vnc,listen=0.0.0.0 --hvm --location=http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/dists/stable/main/installer-amd64/ -...