Hello,
by accident I stumbled over "VMware Instant Clone" ¹, which allows
cloning of running VMs by copy-on-write-sharing the disk images and
memory content; the network MAC address gets changed (or a different
bridge is used?).
I wonder if something similar can also be done with Qemu? My current
solution would be to:
- start and install the VM
- create a live-snapshot into the qcow2 file
- clone the disk image, e.g. put a qcow2 overlay on it per clone
- start and restore the clones from that live-snapshot
- put the clones in individual bridges and let the host do some network
address translation (NAT) to give each clone a unique external IP address.
Has someone done something similar or is there even a better alternative?
Background: our test suite currently provisions a set of multiple VMs,
which are dependent on each other. Provisioning them takes sometimes
many hours. After that the test suite runs inside these VMs and again
takes many hours.
I'd like to speed that up by parallelizing these tests, e.g.
1. setup the VM environment once
2. clone the VM environments as the resources allow
3. distribute tests over these environments to run in parallel and to
allow running flaky tests multiple times from a clean clone again
¹<https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphere/7.0/com.vmware.vsphere.vm_admin.doc/GUID-853B1E2B-76CE-4240-A654-3806912820EB.html>
--
Philipp Hahn
Open Source Software Engineer
Univention GmbH
Mary-Somerville-Str. 1
28359 Bremen
Germany | Deutschland
Phone: +49 (0)421 22232-0 | E-Mail: i...@univention.de
https://www.univention.de | https://www.univention.com
Managing Directors: Peter H. Ganten, Stefan Gohmann
Local court: Amtsgericht Bremen
HRB 20755 | Ust-ID: DE220051310
