Chapter 4. Getting Started with libvirt and Creating Your First Virtual Machines

In Chapter 3, Setting Up Standalone KVM Virtualization, you installed and started the libvirtd services. You were also introduced to the libvirt tools virt-manager and virsh, which help you manage virtual machines.

New users always prefer the GUI rather than text-based commands. Hence we are starting with virt-manager. We also think understanding virt-manager will fast-forward the learning process of managing virtual machines using libvirt and later with virsh. Whenever possible we will present you with the equivalent virsh command so that you can try and learn both virt-manager and virsh.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• All about virt-manager
• Default virtual storage and network configurations
• Various guest installations methods (PXE/ISO/NETWORK/IMPORT)
• Using the virt-builder and oz utilities to rapidly create multiple VMs