Part II Managing virtual machines with libvirt #

Before you can install guest virtual machines, you need to prepare the VM Host Server to provide the guests with the resources that they need for their operation. Specifically, you need to configure:

Virtual Machine Manager's Details view offers in-depth information about the VM Guest's complete configuration and hardware equipment. Using this view, you can also change the guest configuration or add and modify virtual hardware. To access this view, open the guest's console in Virtual Machine Manager and either choose View › Details from the menu, or click Show virtual hardware details in the toolbar.

You can use virsh to configure virtual machines (VM) on the command line as an alternative to using the Virtual Machine Manager. With virsh, you can control the state of a VM, edit the configuration of a VM or even migrate a VM to another host. The following sections describe how to manage VMs by using virsh.

Vagrant is a tool that provides a unified workflow for the creation, deployment and management of virtual development environments. The following sections describe how to manage virtual machines by using Vagrant.

As the KVM virtualization solution is becoming more and more popular among server administrators, many of them need a path to migrate their existing Xen based environments to KVM. As of now, there are no mature tools to automatically convert Xen VMs to KVM. There is, however, a technical solution th…