Kvm on Panic! At The Terminal

How to Restore a Broken KVM VM from Backup

Fri, 18 Jul 2025 20:00:00 +0300

How to Restore a Broken KVM VM from Backup #

Sometimes things go wrong with virtual machines — maybe a filesystem corruption or a bad update. When that happens, restoring from a backup is your best friend.

Here’s how I restored my broken KVM VM disk image using weekly backups stored on a NAS share.

The situation #

I have a VM called runner.home.arpa running on KVM, and its disk got corrupted. The VM disk images live at /var/lib/libvirt/images/, and my backups are stored on a NAS mounted at /mnt/backups/runner.home.arpa/.

Automating KVM Backups with Ansible

Sat, 12 Jul 2025 10:00:00 +0300

Automating KVM Homelab Backups with Ansible #

When you’re running a dozen virtual machines in your homelab, manual backups quickly become a nightmare.

In this post, I’ll walk you through my Ansible-based backup strategy for my KVM homelab. It automatically backs up all VMs by shutting them down gracefully, copying their disk images and configurations to a NAS, and bringing them back online.

Backup Strategy #

My backup strategy uses Ansible to orchestrate the entire process:

Optimizing KVM Virtual Machines with Tuned Profiles

Mon, 07 Jul 2025 12:00:00 +0300

Optimizing KVM Virtual Machines with Tuned Profiles #

The tuned service on Red Hat-based systems provides pre-configured performance profiles that can significantly improve your VM performance with minimal effort.

In this post, I’ll show you how to optimize your KVM VMs using tuned profiles and automate the entire process with Ansible.

The Playbook #

Since I manage dozens of VMs in my homelab, doing this manually would be tedious. Instead, I use this Ansible playbook to apply tuned optimization to all my VMs:

Automated KVM VM Provisioning with Ansible and OSBuild on RHEL9

Thu, 03 Jul 2025 14:00:00 +0300

Automated KVM VM Provisioning with Ansible and OSBuild on RHEL9 #

Introduction #

When I started looking into automating my homelab VM provisioning, I was surprised by the lack of examples combining Ansible with OSBuild for KVM environments. Not many tutorials focus on KVM, so I wanted something that used Red Hat’s tooling - as I run a RHEL homelab.

I used to provision my homelab virtual machines by hand and eventually I got tired of doing it since I like to tinker around a lot and constantly add new VMs. So, I decided to automate the process using the combination of Ansible and OSBuild.