QEMU / KVM support in libvirt & virt-manager

["Daniel P. Berrange" <berrange-H+wXaHxf7aLQT0dZR+AlfA@public.gmane.org>]

FYI, as of libvirt 0.2.0  and virt-manager 0.3.1 there is now (experimental!)
support for managing virtual machines running under QEMU or KVM virtualization
platforms, as well as the existing Xen support.

Project sites:

  http://libvirt.org/
  http://virt-manager.org/

Release announcements here:

  http://www.redhat.com/archives/libvir-list/2007-February/msg00033.html
  http://www.redhat.com/archives/et-mgmt-tools/2007-February/msg00121.html

A little background info, since we've not updated any docs yet... (yes we
suck, will do better with docs soon)

The QEMU driver provides a spawn-on-demand daemon which manages all the QEMU
instances, their monitor consoles, and config files for offline guest VMs.
The KVM support is implemented as part of the generic QEMU driver in libvirt,
and can be activated by setting the domain type to 'kvm' in the XML description
of a guest being created. As an example description of a KVM guest with QEMUs
slirp based user networking, a single harddisk and VNC graphics console, the
XML would look like:

  <domain type='kvm'>
    <name>demo</name>
    <uuid>c7a5fdb0-3daf-9455-926a-d65c16db1809</uuid>
    <memory>403456</memory>
    <currentMemory>403456</currentMemory>
    <vcpu>1</vcpu>
    <os>
      <type arch='i686' machine='pc'>hvm</type>
      <boot dev='hd'/>
    </os>
    <devices>
      <emulator>/usr/bin/qemu</emulator>
      <disk type='file' device='disk'>
        <source file='/home/berrange/q.img'/>
        <target dev='hda'/>
      </disk>
      <interface type='user'>
      </interface>
      <graphics type='vnc' port='-1'/>
    </devices>
  </domain>

The 'virsh' tool can be used to interact with libvirt & QEMU/KVM from the 
shell by specifying an explicit hypervisor URI. eg to list machines:

   virsh --connect  qemu://session  list

The 'virt-install' tool has also been adapted to support provisioning of
QEMU / KVM guests, for example:

   virt-install \
       --connect qemu://session \
       --name demo \
       --ram 400 \
       --file /home/berrange/q.img \
       --cdrom /home/berrange/fedora-core-6-boot-x86_64.iso \
       --accelerate  \
       --vnc \
       --vncport 5905

Finally, 'virt-manager' has been adapted to support all its usual management
capabilities for QEMU / KVM guests. Simply select 'QEMU' as the hypevisor
type when it puts up the initial 'open connection' dialog.

NB. These are the very first prototype releases to support QEM & KVM and
we know of many bugs[1] / limitations. We expect to have updated releases over
the coming weeks/months which will make it much more robust / generally useful
to regular users....

Regards,
Dan.

[1] The spawn-on-demand bit is broken, so requires /usr/libexec/libvirt_qemud
    to be run manually.
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