How to manage CRC Cluster configuration snapshots.

[eduizquierdo]

Hi, I found CRC really usefull for testing & development. But, because all the cluster and deployments are running in the local host, resources are limited and very soon you reach the limits.
It would be very useful having a way to mange snapshots, so you can save your current cluster configuration and start a fresh one where you can add more resources without hitting the limits. Apparently, doesn’t look a feature very complex to develop as all the cluster configuration in inside the virtual machine and CRC already provides commands to create a new virtual machine. The one thing missing is commands to save&restore current VM before creating a new one (crc --save-snapshot and crc --restore-snapshot).
Like this feature is not available (or I'm not aware of it), I’m looking for a way to do it manually.
Is there a safe way for creating a copy of the VM and restoring later as to be used by “CRC start”?

[gbraad]

We do not handle snapshots as crc by itself is meant as an ephemeral setup.
You could however rely on virsh to make snapshots (on Linux), but that would be handled outside of CRC.

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$ virsh snapshot-create-as --domain crc --name "before-deployment"

$ virsh snapshot-list --domain crc

For more see: https://libvirt.org/manpages/virsh.html#snapshot-commands

Note: this can have effect on the way the CRC command works, as when a snapshot exists the VM can not be deleted using the regular crc delete command. This is because the snapshots are in a different location from the actual VM. In that case you would need to delete each snapshot and associated metadata first:

$ sudo virsh snapshot-delete --metadata crc <snapshot-name>