Mastering Ubuntu Server - Second Edition

Managing virtual machines via the command line

In this chapter, I showed you how to manage virtual machines with virt-manager. This is great if you have a secondary machine with a graphical user interface running Linux as its operating system. But what do you do if such a machine isn't available, and you'd like to perform simple tasks such as rebooting a virtual machine or checking to see which virtual machines are running on the server?

On the virtual machine server itself, you have access to the virsh suite of commands, which will allow you to manage virtual machines even if a GUI isn't available. To use these commands, simply connect to the machine that stores your virtual machines via SSH. What follows are some easy examples to get you ...