Restoring an image, in a VM, without booting it

Question

I'm using a UEC Cloud (with kvm)

• Can I restore an image, in a VM, without booting it? (like freezing the image and then restarting the image on that exact tick while skipping the whole booting)
• Is that what 'Snapshot' is?

If it's possible, then what are the general steps to do it?

Answer 1

I think that virsh save and virsh restore are the commands you are looking for. Virsh is a part of libvirt, an abstraction layer that can talk to different virtualization solutions like kvm and xen.

I don't know how these two commands are implemented.

Answer 2

Virsh restore is the command to directly start the VM without booting from teh lastly saved state file.

it restart the VM in the same position in which the state file was saved.

virsh restore /path/to/state file.state