New in libguestfs 1.12: use UUIDs in virt tools

In this series of posts I’ll be looking at what’s new in the forthcoming release of libguestfs 1.12.

If you follow the example in my Summit handout you can use virt-df to monitor your VMs’ disk usage over time. But what if your VMs migrate between hosts or get renamed? Previously you had to rely on the guest name being unique and not changing. In libguestfs 1.12 we have changed most of the virt tools so you can now use a UUID to specify guests instead of a name.

# virt-df -d 799ae7ca-23a2-f622-c691-48feebcddbe6 -h
Filesystem                      Size       Used  Available  Use%
799ae7ca-23a2-f622-c691-48feebcddbe6:/dev/sda1
                                484M        67M       393M   14%
799ae7ca-23a2-f622-c691-48feebcddbe6:/dev/vg_f13x64/lv_root
                                7.4G       4.3G       3.1G   58%