Once your VG's are on-line their block devices are accessible in /dev/VGNAME/ so using 'dd' to create an off-line copy should be no problem (compare hashes if in doubt). However my test shows (at least my version of qemu-img) doesn't convert from Live LVM to VMDK without intermediate step. Instead of booting the VM guest with 4GL you could boot it with any Live CD that allows you network access. Then from inside your KVM guest you can 'dd' the image over the network using netcat or SSH and 'dd' it straight into the VM guest.


///BTW rsync and tar can both preserve attibutes, extended attributes and SELinux contexts as well. Manual page sez so.