Linux in a Nutshell, 6th Edition

libvirt and Red Hat Virtual Machine Manager

The libvirt virtualization API provides an open source programming interface to hypervisors like Xen and KVM. It comes with virsh, a management interface for controlling hypervisors. A closely related project, the Red Hat Virtual Machine Manager application, is a collection of tools built using libvirt. This includes a few command-line tools as well as the GUI virt-manager application.

Whether you are using Xen or KVM, these libvirt based tools will handle most of the tasks of creating and managing your guests. Except for some minor differences in what each hypervisor supports and the connection string used to get to the hypervisor, these commands work the same regardless of what hypervisor you choose. You’ll want to know these tools well.