In this 4th part of our KVM series, we are discussing KVM environment management using CLI. We use ‘virt-install’ CL tool to create and configure virtual machines, virsh CL tool to create and configure storage pools and qemu-img CL tool to create and manage disk images.

1 libvirt Wiki
1.1 General project documentation
1.2 Books
1.3 Configuration Management
1.4 Conversion
1.5 Guest Management
1.5.1 Concepts
1.5.2 CGroups
1.5.3 CPU
1.5.4 KVM / QEMU
1.5.5 Guest device Configuration
1.5.6 Virtio
1.6 libguestfs / guestfish
1.7 Networking
1.7.1 Concepts
1.7.2 Detailed networking pieces
1.8 Perl
1.9 Provisioning
1.9.1 Cobbler
1.9.2 Foreman
1.10 Remote Management
1.10.1 CIM
1.10.2 QPID
1.11 Security
1.11.1 Host Security
1.11.2 SSH
1.11.3 Transport Layer Security (TLS)
1.12 Storage
1.12.1 iSCSI
1.12.2 QCow2 disk encryption
1.12.3 Disk and Memory Snapshots
1.13 Third Party Libvirt Applications
1.14 Other
1.14.1 Images
1.15 Getting started with the Wiki

Today, nearly every modern computing-related company uses directly or indirectly a virtualization software. As seen with the recent Cloud computing trend, it is a sector that recently exploded in popularity and it is now accessible to everyone.
There are now a LOT of alternatives to virtualize an OS :
Isolation : OpenVZ, VServer, LXC, UML, BSD jails, Solaris zones…
Paravirtualization : Xen
Full virtualization : VMWare Player/Workstation/ESX/ESXi, KVM/Qemu, Virtualbox, Bochs…
When having to deal with a large pack of machines for building packages, testing software on multiple OSes or optimally use a powerful server with lots of RAM, you rapidly should, if not have to, realize that Virtual Machines can make your life significantly easier. It was the case for us.

This is a collection of notes I took while setting up a virtual machine host which has several guest virtual machines running on Ubuntu 8.10.

Manage your virtual machines
From the shell
You can manage your VMs from the shell using virsh. You can get a list of the available commands if you type "help". Type "help command" to get additional infos for a particular command.

The virsh command can be used to mange local or remote guest operating systems. The program can be used to create, pause, and shutdown domains. It can also be used to list current domains.