A short summary of useful KVM-Qemu commands and tricks.
disk images in qcow2 format tend to grow after while if one installs more and more stuff in the VMs. In order to free up space and shrink the qcow2 images do the following:
qemu-img convert -c -O qcow2 image.img shrunk.image.img
Test the new image by booting it the usual way and afterwards delete the original.img
In order to better control what gets onto the images we can use an internal snapshot function like so:
qemu-img create -f qcow2 -b shrunk.image.img snapshot01.shrunk.image.img
This way you can create as many snapshots as you need. I usually create simple bash scripts to load each VM snapshots like this :
Snapshot01 kvm -m 1024 -vga std -drive file=snapshot01.shrunk.image.img,cache=none,if=virtio Snapshot02 kvm -m 1024 -vga std -drive file=snapshot02.shrunk.image.img,cache=none,if=virtio etc ...
In case you need to revert back, just delete the snapshot file and create a new one from the original shrunk.image.img
When running Windows guests it is essential to run SAMBA on the host server and dedicate some shared folder so that the guests can access. For guest *nix systems sshd on host is sufficient as most systems ship with scp. When none of these are available or the VM network does not work, you can still try and use raw disk image and use that to copy over files.
Here I will use an example of a small USB flash stick 2 GB.
Lets assume it is formatted with some universally accepted file system (FAT32)
dd if=/dev/sdb1 of=/path/to/kvm/images/disk.raw
once the raw fat32 partition from the USB disk is dumped we can mount it via loop interface locally and copy files to/from.
mount -o loop disk.raw /mnt/usb
When finished, unmount and attach to KVM qemu as secondary IDE/virtio drive
kvm -vga vmware -m 1024 -drive file=snapshot01.shrunk.image.img,cache=none,index=1,if=virtio -drive file=disk.raw,index=2 -boot c
