This is completely doable with RAW disk image format. I don't know about qcow2...
Debian.img: x86 boot sector; partition 1: ID=0x83, active, starthead 32, startsector 2048, 497664 sectors; partition 2: ID=0x5, starthead 59, startsector 501758, 104353794 sectors, code offset 0x63
Debian2.img: x86 boot sector; partition 1: ID=0x83, active, starthead 32, startsector 2048, 497664 sectors; partition 2: ID=0x5, starthead 59, startsector 501758, 104353794 sectors, code offset 0x63
For test I cped a running linux mint system with everything. Then created a new vm with the new image, it didn't even have filesystem inconsistencies at boot. Although this was just a small desktop vm, what I was about to "clone" is a running LAMP server in production with high I/O on the database.
I really wouldn't care about inconsistency, just wanted to save some time to resetup the LAMP environment, I guess creating a base image at the beginning or snapshotting the first web server would've been a good idea but after it was fully configured and tested it was too late, they started using it in production right away.
virt-clone
is also allowed aftervirsh suspend
; perhaps, that won't count as a real shutdown for you.virt-clone
no longer supports cloning suspended machines.