qemu-img to do have a copy of a kvm os to vmdk file

[Tapas Mishra]

I have a production environment where I am having 4 Guest OS running
on a Ubuntu server which uses kvm.
These OS are in an LVM based setup.I want these Virtual Machines to in
a vmdk format also.Where people would do
experiments with these Virtual Machines so this in a vmware
environment (or it can be Xen too)  would be different from the kvm
server.

The production Virtual Machines will still keep running on kvm server
but the VMs on which experiments would be done would be of type vmdk.


Here is output of lvscan

 ACTIVE            '/dev/abcd/lvm1' [100.00 GiB] inherit
  ACTIVE            '/dev/abcd/lvm2' [150.00 GiB] inherit
  ACTIVE            '/dev/abcd/lvm3' [50.00 GiB] inherit
  ACTIVE            '/dev/abcd/lvm4' [100.00 GiB] inherit




I was reading man page of qemu-img and what I understand is I need to
first create a qcow image file which I need to populate and then
convert that to a vmdk file.
Is that understanding correct?

Now suppose /dev/abcd/lvm4 is the virtual machine with which I am
going to start this experiment.I can shutdown the production VMs for
some time to do this.

Show is the following way correct to go on server 1 (where kvm is running)

qemu-img convert -c -f raw -O vmdk /dev/abcd/lvm4 /backup/lvm4.img

 or it will affect the lvm4 on kvm server 1.

I do not want the VM running on original server to at all loose its
any of the content but also have a vmdk file for each of the Guest OS
on kvm.


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