As you would have seen in Virtualbox or vmware, there is option to create a linked clone. I wanted to use the same feature as “Snapshot” feature anyway does not look/work so great with virt-manager. So, I created a script to create a linked clone VM and here it is :

#!/bin/bash - 
#===============================================================================
#
#          FILE: qcow2-linked-clone.sh
# 
#         USAGE: ./qcow2-linked-clone.sh 
# 
#   DESCRIPTION: 
# 
#       OPTIONS: ---
#  REQUIREMENTS: ---
#          BUGS: ---
#         NOTES: ---
#        AUTHOR: Amit Agarwal (aka)
#  ORGANIZATION: Mobileum
#       CREATED: 01/05/2018 09:54
# Last modified: Wed Feb 28, 2018  04:39PM
#      REVISION:  ---
#===============================================================================

set -o nounset                              # Treat unset variables as an error
UP="amitag:amitag" #Here you need to put your username and group.

if [[ $# == 0 ]]
then
    read -p "Enter the source path :: " spath
    read -p "Enter the source disk :: " sdisk
    read -p "Enter the destin path :: " dpath
    read -p "Enter the destin disk :: " ddisk
    read -p "Enter new VMName :: " vmname
else
    spath=$(dirname $1)
    dpath=$spath
    sdisk=$(basename $1)
    ddisk=$2.qcow2
    vmname=$2
fi


sudo chown $UP "$spath/$sdisk"
qemu-img create -f qcow2 -b "$spath/$sdisk" "$dpath/$ddisk"

virt-install --disk $dpath/$ddisk --ram 512 \
    --virt-type kvm --vcpus 1 --name "$vmname" --import

The script will create a linked qcow2 and then create a VM with that image. Running it is simple, either provide command line options or just run and it will ask you for details.

Hope it is useful.

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