The virtualization host that I used for my investigations was also a VM. Another option would be to use a clone of an existing VM. I advise against using a VM that you care about, so we'll start by using virt-manager to create a test VM from scratch. This article assumes that you created a VM with virt-manager or another tool in the libvirt framework. Note that I do not recommend the approach described here for a VM running in production (at least, not without backup). I hope this article makes it easier for you to configure and run your own QEMU-based VM for similar investigations. I found the process of configuring the test VM and writing the boot script more involved than expected, so I decided to document the steps I took.

By default, libvirt runs with that option off, so I decided to set up a standalone QEMU environment. I was investigating an issue that required running QEMU with the machine option dump-guest-core=on. I recently needed to run a virtual machine (VM) created using virt-manager outside of libvirt.