Hi,
(tl;dr : how can I clone a KVM-based bridged virtual machine and force a duplicate MAC address ?)
Up until recently I've been using VirtualBox on my workstation to test various local setups. Usually I would setup a basic CentOS installation, and whenever I wanted to fiddle around, I would just clone that system and play around with it. So whenever I shot myself in the foot on that VM, I would simply erase it and start over again with a new clone. Think of it as a disposable VM.
All my VMs under VirtualBox used bridged mode, so they were in the same network. And in my local proxy server, I have Dnsmasq that assigns static IP addresses and meaningful hostnames to these VMs. Here's what the corresponding lines in dnsmasq.conf look like:
dhcp-host=08:00:27:00:00:01,suse-lp151,192.168.2.10 dhcp-host=08:00:27:00:00:02,suse-lp152,192.168.2.11 dhcp-host=08:00:27:00:00:03,ce7-server,192.168.2.12 dhcp-host=08:00:27:00:00:04,ce8-server,192.168.2.13 dhcp-host=08:00:27:00:00:05,ol7-server,192.168.2.14 dhcp-host=08:00:27:00:00:06,ol8-server,192.168.2.15 dhcp-host=08:00:27:00:00:07,rh7-server,192.168.2.16 dhcp-host=08:00:27:00:00:08,rh8-server,192.168.2.17
Over the last two weeks, I decided to migrate from VirtualBox to KVM even for local configurations and virtualized desktop configurations. So far, everything works nice... except one problem I can't seem to solve (yet).
I'm using KVM in bridged mode, over a br0 bridge on my workstation. Like with VirtualBox, all my KVM virtual machines are part of my local 192.168.2.0/24 network.
Unfortunately there is no way to simply make a perfect clone of a virtual machine using virt-manager. It insists on assigning my cloned VM a different MAC address. And whenever I want to manually create a NIC with the same MAC address as the original, Virtual Machine Manager tells me I can't do that. Same player shoot again.
Now I know that is normally a good thing. You don't want MAC address conflicts in your network. But here's the thing: I don't intend to fire up both copies at once. As with VirtualBox, I only intend to use one VM at a time, for testing purposes. Now how can I "explain" this to Virtual Machine Manager without having to jump through burning loops ?
Cheers,
Niki