I am creating a library API which will take the backup of all the VM's running on KVM hypervisor. My VM's can be of any type. I am taking this backup from a remote machine and need to put the backup at remote server.

I have KVM, Libvirt installed on my system.

Some of my VM's are LVM based and some are normal VM's running on KVM. I research and found out an excellent perl script for taking the backup http://pof.eslack.org/2010/12/23/best-solution-to-fully-backup-kvm-virtual-machines/ but since I am developing this library in C++ I cannot use it however it has given me a good understanding of how it will work.

One thing I didnot able to sort out is if my VM's are not created using virt-manager or are created using any other tool them virsh system list command does not give them in the list of running VM's however they are running perfectly on my KVM server. Is there a way to list these VM's in my system list anyhow?

secondly, when I am taking backup from the remote machine I am getting out of my ssh mode as soon as my libvirt command finishes and for every command I need to ssh again, Is there a way that I do not need to ssh each and every time? I have already used the rsa key for ssh but when once my command finishes my control moves to the remote machine again and try to find out my source VM location in remote machine's local drives which in turn fails it. here is the main problem I am facing.

also for the LVM based VM I am able to take the live backup but for non LVM based my machines are getting suspended and not been able to take the live backup. Since my library will work on the remote machine only I might not know the VM's configruation on the KVM server. so need to make it consistent for all the VM's. Please share any thing related to this issue so that I may be able to take the live backup of the non lvm vm's also.

I'll update my working and any research findings time to time to all of you.

Thanks in advance for your suggestions in these regards.