Part V Managing Virtual Machines with QEMU #

QEMU is a fast, cross-platform open source machine emulator which can emulate a huge number of hardware architectures for you. QEMU lets you run a complete unmodified operating system (VM Guest) on top of your existing system (VM Host Server).

This section documents how to set up and use SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 SP5 as a QEMU-KVM based virtual machine host.

The libvirt-based tools such as virt-manager and virt-install offer convenient interfaces to set up and manage virtual machines. They act as a kind of wrapper for the qemu-system-ARCHcommand. However, it is also possible to use qemu-system-ARCH directly without using libvirt-based tools.

Once you have a virtual disk image ready (for more information on disk images, see Section 28.2, “Managing Disk Images with qemu-img”), it is time to start the related virtual machine. Section 28.1, “Basic Installation with qemu-system-ARCH” introduced simple commands to install and run a VM Guest. …

When a virtual machine is invoked by the qemu-system-ARCH command, for example qemu-system-x86_64, a monitor console is provided for performing interaction with the user. Using the commands available in the monitor console, it is possible to inspect the running operating system, change removable med…