I would like to save a running domain (ie. disk + memory) and be able to restore it multiple times creating duplicates of the orignal domain all starting from the same state.

Use case:
I'm building a task-processing system for use in a CI flow.

I want to run multiple VMs in parallel using the same image (always starting from the same state).

And to avoid needlessly booting between each task, I would like to save (and distribute) the domain state, so that I just restore from memory.

However, I can't seems to change the UUID or the name of a domain once it is saved.

Nor do I seem able to rename a domain while it is running.

I can obviously duplicate both the disks and the file to which I saved the domain state using "virsh save".

But I seem unable to rename before I restore.. Any ideas?

virDomainDefCheckABIStability which raises the error here:

Out of curiosity does anyone know what horrors might befall me if I were to remove the lines protecting against name and UUID changes? Then compile my own libvirt...

The comment in the code says name can be changed, but I'm guessing I would have to change the UUID too. Does anyone see how that would create issues? I'm not sure how libvirt uses the UUID internally.