[et-mgmt-tools] "personal" use of virt- tools

Cole Robinson crobinso at redhat.com
Tue Oct 14 15:09:31 UTC 2008


Orion Poplawski wrote:
> I'd like to setup Windows guests (using qemu-kvm) on my users' laptops 
> that they can have access to.  Ideally I'd like to provide an icon that 
> would startup the virtual machine and connect to it.  Is 
> virt-manager/libvirtd and company the right tools for this job?  If so, 
> how would I go about doing this?  If not, any other suggestions?
> 
> Thanks!
> 

The libvirt stack could certainly help accomplish this. Assuming
you install the windows vm using virt-manager or virt-install
before hand, a simple script would do the job:

UUID=`virsh --connect qemu:///system domuuid vm-name`
virsh --connect qemu:///system start $UUID
virt-manager --connect qemu:///system \
             --show-domain-console=$UUID

This will pop up the machine console via virt-manager.
You will probably need the latest virt-manager version
for this to work correctly. This also has the added
benefit of allowing the user to connect/eject cdroms
to the guest, or pass a USB thumbdrive through as well.

You can also replace virt-manager with virt-viewer,
which will provide a graphical console but no CDROM/USB
options:

virt-viewer --connect qemu:///system $UUID

If the user will be starting these VM's as a regular
user, they will need extra permissions to run the
above commands. On Fedora you can use PolicyKit with
libvirt (http://libvirt.org/auth.html#ACL_server_polkit)
or a typical sudo type setup would work as well.

Thanks,
Cole




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