Virt-builder

Virt-builder is a tool for quickly building new virtual machines. You can build a variety of VMs for local or cloud use, usually within a few minutes or less. Virt-builder also has many ways to customize these VMs. Everything is run from the command line and nothing requires root privileges, so automation and scripting is simple.

Note that virt-builder does not install guests from scratch. It takes cleanly prepared, digitally signed OS templates and customizes them. This approach is used because it is much faster, but if you need to do fresh installs you may want to look at virt-install(1) and oz-install(1).

Refer to the extensive documentation of virt-builder.

Installation

Virt-builder tool is provided as part of libguestfs-tools-c RPM package in Fedora:

$ sudo dnf install libguestfs-tools-c

Simple usage

Build a minimal VM disk image:

$ virt-builder fedora-27 --root-password password:123456

will build a Fedora 27 image (called ‘fedora-27.img’, in the current working directory, which will later be imported into libvirt for use) for the same architecture as virt-builder (so running it from an i386 installation will try to build an i386 image, if available). This will have all default configuration (minimal size, no user accounts, random root password, only the bare minimum installed software, etc.).

Import the above disk image into libvirt:

$ virt-install \
   --name f27vm1 --ram 2048 \
   --disk path=fedora-27.img,format=raw \
   --os-variant fedora27 \
   --import

Note: The --os-variant doesn’t strictly have to be F27; the nearest possible available Fedora variant is fine. To find the list of variants for your current Fedora release, run: osinfo-query os | grep fedora.

Examples to create custom virtual machines

Create an up-to-date Fedora 27 VM

Prepare a QCOW2 Fedora 27 VM, with 40GB disk size, and update to latest available packages:

$ virt-builder fedora-27 -o f27vm2.qcow2 --format qcow2 \
    --update --selinux-relabel --size 40G

Import the disk image into libvirt, and provide it 4GB of memory:

$ virt-install --name f27vm2 --ram 4096 \
    --disk path=f27vm2.qcow2,format=qcow2,cache=writeback \
    --nographics --os-variant fedora27 --import

Create a rawhide VM disk image

This creates a rawhide disk image:

$ virt-builder fedora-27 \
    --install fedora-repos-rawhide \
    --edit '/etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-rawhide.repo: s/enabled=0/enabled=1/' \
    --update \
    --selinux-relabel --size 40G \
    --output rawhide-vm.img

Import it into libvirt with virt-install (as shown in previous examples).

NOTE: The ‘fedora-repos-rawhide’ RPM can also be installed from inside the image too:

$ sudo dnf install fedora-repos-rawhide

Manipulating the virtual machines

Use the libvirt shell interface virsh(1) or virt-manager(1) to manipulate the VM. A couple of examples:

Enumerate all virtual machines:

$ sudo virsh list --all

Start a VM:

$ sudo virsh start f27vm1

Take a snapshot of a running virtual machine:

$ sudo virsh snapshot-create-as f27vm1 snap1 "Clean F27 VM"

NOTE: With this kind of snapshot, the original and its delta (the snapshot) are stored in a single disk image file (convenient for moving them across machines). The VM disk image should be of QCOW2 format.

Revert to a specific snapshot:

$ sudo virsh snapshot-revert f27vm1 snap1

Cleaning up VMs and their associated storage:

To gracefully shutdown and delete a virtual machine (including all its associated disk images):

$ sudo virsh stop f27vm1
$ sudo virsh undefine f27vm1 --remove-all-storage

NOTE: The flag --remove-all-storage will delete the VM’s disk image(s), so ensure you took out relevant data from your VMs.

Authors: Adam Samalik, Dylan Silva, Josef Stribny, Kashyap Chamarthy, Petr Hracek