Recently I stumbled over the possibility to retro-actively modify the snapshot XML data of saved VMs. This is most helpful for fixing the fallout of Bug #50412, where several CPUs features related to “TSX” where disabled by the Linux kernel to prevent the TSX Asynchronous Abort vulnerability.

You can also use the --rename option, which allows you to rename your snapshots, but this is buggy: It only renames the XML file and the data within, but not the name of the snapshot within the QCOW2 file itself! Reverting will fail afterwards.

For inactive VM you can fix it manually like this:

1. Get the name of your QCOW2 files: virsh domblklist "$VM"
2. Get the list of snapshots: virsh snapshot-list "$VM"
3. Compare them to the names stored in the QCOW2 file: qemu-img snapshot -l "$PATH"
4. For every mismatching snapshot, re-create the snapshot with the new name and delete the old one:
   1. Revert to old snapshot: qemu-img snapshot -a "$OLD" "$PATH"
   2. Create new snapshot: qemu-img snapshot -c "$NEW" "$PATH"
   3. Delete old snapshot: qemu-img snapshot -d "$OLD" "$PATH"