Virtualization

Run virtual machines at near-native speeds and manage them at ease

Virtualization Installing QEMU on Fedora Linux Fetching OVMF UEFI from the correct source Installing libvirt and virt-install on Fedora Linux Setting up Fedora Workstation VM on QEMU using BIOS Setting up Fedora Workstation VM on QEMU using UEFI Setting up intrinsic VNC server with VMs Setting viewport resolution using OVMF BIOS Setting up Fedora Workstation domain on libvirt Sharing a chunk of memory as video memory in QEMU Mapping a virtualized guest port to a host port Playing around with various VGA providers Offloading domain TTY output to console with custom kernel/initramfs images Offloading domain TTY output to console with original kernel/initramfs images
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Installing libvirt and virt-install on Fedora Linux

Common terms

Libvirt

Libvirt is an open-source API, daemon and management tool for managing platform virtualization. It can be used to manage KVM, Xen, VMware ESXi, QEMU and other virtualization technologies. These APIs are widely used in the orchestration layer of hypervisors in the development of a cloud-based solution.

The Libvirt project:

  • is a toolkit to manage virtualization platforms
  • is accessible from C, Python, Perl, Go and more
  • supports KVM, QEMU, Xen, Virtuozzo, VMWare ESX, LXC, BHyve and more
  • targets Linux, FreeBSD, Windows and macOS
  • is used by many applications

Read more about Libvirt here

Virt-install

virt-install is a command line tool for creating new KVM , Xen, or Linux container guests using the “libvirt” hypervisor management library. See the EXAMPLES section at the end of this document to quickly get started.

virt-install tool supports both text based & graphical installations, using VNC or SDL graphics, or a text serial console. The guest can be configured to use one or more virtual disks, network interfaces, audio devices, physical USB or PCI devices, among others.

The installation media can be held locally or remotely on NFS , HTTP , FTP servers. In the latter case “virt-install” will fetch the minimal files necessary to kick off the installation process, allowing the guest to fetch the rest of the OS distribution as needed. PXE booting, and importing an existing disk image (thus skipping the install phase) are also supported.

Given suitable command line arguments, “virt-install” is capable of running completely unattended, with the guest ‘kickstarting’ itself too. This allows for easy automation of guest installs. An interactive mode is also available with the –prompt option, but this will only ask for the minimum required options.

Read more about Virt-install here

Installing steps

  1. Execute the following command to install libvirt on the host device, if not already installed. 
    $ sudo dnf install libvirt -y

    01

  2. Execute the following command to install virt-install on the host device, if not already installed. 
    $ sudo dnf install virt-install -y

    02

Usages

  1. Setting up Fedora Workstation domain on libvirt

Authors: Akashdeep Dhar, Jarek Prokop, Nick Dirschel