Virtual Machine Manager

Manage virtual machines

The "Virtual Machine Manager" application (virt-manager for short package name) is a desktop user interface for managing virtual machines. It presents a summary view of running domains, their live performance & resource utilization statistics. The detailed view graphs performance & utilization over time. Wizards enable the creation of new domains, and configuration & adjustment of a domain's resource allocation & virtual hardware. An embedded VNC client viewer presents a full graphical console to the guest domain.

About VMM's supporting tools

The "Virt Install" tool (virt-install for short command name, virtinst for package name) is a command line tool which provides an easy way to provision operating systems into virtual machines. It also provides an API to the virt-manager application for its graphical VM creation wizard.

The "Virt Clone" tool (virt-clone for short command name, virtinst for package name) is a command line tool for cloning existing inactive guests. It copies the disk images, and defines a config with new name, UUID and MAC address pointing to the copied disks.

The "Virt Image" tool (virt-image for short command name, virtinst for package name) is a command line tool for installing guest operating systems based on a pre-defined master image. The image provides metadata describing the requirements of the operating system, minimal resource allocations, and pre-installed disk.

The "Virtual Machine Viewer" application (virt-viewer for short package name) is a lightweight interface for interacting with the graphical display of virtualized guest OS. It uses GTK-VNC as its display capability, and libvirt to lookup the VNC server details associated with the guest. It is intended as a replacement for the traditional vncviewer client, since the latter does not support SSL/TLS encryption of x509 certificate authentication.

Under the hood

The application logic is written in Python, while the UI is constructed with Glade and GTK+.

The libvirt Python bindings are used to interacting with the underlying hypervisor. This enables the application to be written independant of any particular hypervisor technology.

Initially Xen was the primary platform supported, however, since libvirt 0.2.0 and virt-manager 0.3.1 it is possible to manage QEMU and KVM guests too. It is expected that support for additional hypervisors / virtualization products will expand even further over time as additional libvirt drivers are written.

Go there...
http://virt-manager.org/

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