New in virt-sysprep: Set root and user passwords

New in virt-sysprep ≥ 1.23.13 is the ability to set root and user passwords in Linux guests (previous manual method is described here).

$ virt-sysprep \
  --root-password password:123456 \
  --password joe:file:/tmp/secret -a guest.img

You shouldn’t normally specify the cleartext password on the command line, although it’s useful for testing. You should usually provide a file containing the password, ensuring that it is not readable by other users on the system (ie. mode 0600).

New tool: virt-sysprep

New in libguestfs 1.13.19 is a tool called virt-sysprep which makes it easier to clone virtual machines.

The new tool isn’t a complete clone tool, but you can easily combine it with other tools like dd, the old virt-clone, virt-resize and virt-sparsify to clone virtual machines.