You can create, delete, run, stop, and manage your virtual machines from the command line, using a tool called virsh. Virsh is particularly useful for advanced Linux administrators, interested in script or automating some aspects of managing their virtual machines
Installing
Install virsh:
sudo apt-get install libvirt-bin
Connecting
Connect to your hypervisor. This can be local, or even remote. In most cases, if you want to manage VMs running on the local hypervisor:
$ virsh connect qemu:///system Connecting to uri: qemu:///system
Listing VMs
$ virsh list Id Name State ---------------------------------- 1 foo running
Creating a Virtual Machine
Virtual Machines managed by virsh are created by describing the virtual machine in a libvirt XML file, and importing that XML file into virsh.
You can export the XML of an existing virtual machine:
$ virsh dumpxml foo > /tmp/foo.xml Connecting to uri: qemu:///system
And then edit /tmp/foo.xml, which should be rather straightforward. For more information about libvirt XML format, see:
Once you have an XML file describing the new virtual machine you want to create, import it into virsh, and run it immediately:
$ virsh create /tmp/foo_new.xml Connecting to uri: qemu:///system Domain foo_new created from /tmp/foo_new.xml $ virsh list Connecting to uri: qemu:///system Id Name State ---------------------------------- 3 foo_new running
Alternatively, if you want to define it, but not run it, you could have used:
$ virsh define /tmp/foo_new.xml
Working with a Running Virtual Machine
Once a virtual machine is running, you can manage it in many different ways, such as:
$ virsh start foo
$ virsh reboot foo
$ virsh shutdown foo
$ virsh suspend foo
$ virsh resume foo
You can also affect the memory, dynamically attach devices, interfaces, modify the networking configuration, etc. This guide in this wiki page is clearly not comprehensive. For a complete description of virsh commands, see:
$ man virsh
Console
Sometimes, it's useful to attach to the console of a running VM, to obtain debugging information, etc.
$ virsh console foo Connected to domain foo Escape character is ^]
Details
To view the details about a particular virtual machine:
$ virsh dumpxml foo
These can be saved to a file, modified, and imported again using:
$ virsh define foo
Deleting a Virtual Machine
To delete a virtual machine, first terminate it (if running), and then undefine it:
$ virsh destroy foo_new $ virsh undefine foo_new
More Information
For more complete documentation on virsh, see: