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B.14. Migration Fails with Unable to allow access for disk path: No such file or directory

Symptom
A guest virtual machine (or domain) cannot be migrated because libvirt cannot access the disk image(s):
# virsh migrate qemu qemu+tcp://name_of_host/system
error: Unable to allow access for disk path /var/lib/libvirt/images/qemu.img: No such file or directory
For example, if the destination host name is "newyork", the error message will appear as:
# virsh migrate qemu qemu+tcp://newyork/system
error: Unable to allow access for disk path /var/lib/libvirt/images/qemu.img: No such file or directory
Investigation
By default, migration only transfers the in-memory state of a running guest (such as memory or CPU state). Although disk images are not transferred during migration, they need to remain accessible at the same path by both hosts.
Solution
Set up and mount shared storage at the same location on both hosts. The simplest way to do this is to use NFS:

Procedure B.5. Setting up shared storage

  1. Set up an NFS server on a host serving as shared storage. The NFS server can be one of the hosts involved in the migration, as long as all hosts involved are accessing the shared storage through NFS.
    # mkdir -p /exports/images
    # cat >>/etc/exports <<EOF
    /exports/images    192.168.122.0/24(rw,no_root_squash)
    EOF
  2. Mount the exported directory at a common location on all hosts running libvirt. For example, if the IP address of the NFS server is 192.168.122.1, mount the directory with the following commands:
    # cat >>/etc/fstab <<EOF
    192.168.122.1:/exports/images  /var/lib/libvirt/images  nfs  auto  0 0
    EOF
    # mount /var/lib/libvirt/images

Note

It is not possible to export a local directory from one host using NFS and mount it at the same path on another host — the directory used for storing disk images must be mounted from shared storage on both hosts. If this is not configured correctly, the guest virtual machine may lose access to its disk images during migration, because the source host's libvirt daemon may change the owner, permissions, and SELinux labels on the disk images after it successfully migrates the guest to its destination.
If libvirt detects that the disk images are mounted from a shared storage location, it will not make these changes.