When creating a new virtual machine with F11 virt-manager... The dialog asks you early on for an install method. In later steps/screens of the dialog, it allows you to associate an existing disk image/storage. One big use case of existing storage would be an already-installed image. Perhaps they used other tools to make the image, or copied it from elsewhere, etc. Therefore, to construct a new machine using an existing root, I'd suggest asking for this as a choice at the same time you offer installation methods. My personal suggestion would be to allow one to have a choice of using an existing image in Step 1 of 'Create a new virtual machine'. I'd suggest something like this: Choose how you would like to install the operating system: * Local install media (ISO image or CDROM) * Network Install (HTTP, FTP, or NFS) * Network Boot (PXE) * Use pre-existing storage for root If they choose 'Use pr-existing storage for root', it could ask for the path in step 2 where it would normally ask for the ISO path, etc. As it sits today, creating a new node but avoiding the installation is a bit quirky. For example, I normally choose "PXE" so that I can associate the root disk in the later step. However, that means the first boot tries to PXE and I have to shutdown the machine and start it again to use that pre-existing storage as the root device. This is just a suggestion/RFE. Thanks much for all the improvements in virt-manager/libvirt that I see in F11. # rpm -q qemu-kvm libvirt virt-manager qemu-kvm-0.10.4-4.fc11.x86_64 libvirt-0.6.2-11.fc11.x86_64 virt-manager-0.7.0-5.fc11.x86_64
The "New VM" wizard is intended to only be for creating new VMs from scratch The virt-image tool (see virt-image(1) and virt-image(5) man pages) is really what you want for creating a VM from an existing image Moving to upstream virt-manager as an RFE for "import existing image" support. It may be decided not to add this in order to keep the UI less confusing
There is confusion and then there is confusion. virt-manager should support importing an existing image for both completeness and usability. Forcing the user to use command line programs is more confusing.
Adding UI to support this is target for after F12 GA. It's really only in the planning stages though. Rather than use virt-image, which is really for distributing appliances (and there isn't an easy way build virt-image XML at the moment), you can use the --import flag to virt-install, so: virt-install ... --disk path=/path/to/my/disk --import ... There is an example for this use case in the virt-install man pages.
*** Bug 473435 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
This is available in virt-manager 0.8.4