[GTALUG] Setting up a VM host

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Mon, Aug 29, 2016 at 04:10:51PM -0400, Alex Volkov via talk wrote:
> I don't think this was mentioned before, but KVM/libvirt with shell
> interface, besides gui inteface (virt-manager) there's a shell interface
> virsh, which let you configure VM using shells scripts.
> 
> libvirt, is just a bunch of processes with, and I'm sorry, xml config files
> located in /etc/libvirt. You can have any number of virtualization
> technologies (LXC, KVM) and any number user backends -- (virt-manager,
> virsh); managing all of that requires copying configuration and image files
> around -- it doesn't get any simpler than that; unlike QEMU, you don't need
> to pass long line of arguments to start up the machine and you get such
> niceties as autostarting VMs on machine boot, not to mention that the whole
> thing is enterpris-y and supported by redhat.
> 
> Actually virt-manager works pretty well -- libvirt likes ssh, and uses
> client/server architecture, so when connecting to a remote host you don't
> have to  tunnel it through ssh, just have it on a client machine and give
> it a correct url.

My first (and last) encounter with libvirt was that I wanted to use kvm
with smp, and at the time it didn't know about the smp option, so you
simply couldn't do that.  So given the use of both xml, and the inability
of keeping up with kvm/qemu options, I determined it was hopeless and
went with doing it myself which works great.

-- 
Len Sorensen