what is libvirt?

Libvirt is a C toolkit to interact with the virtualization capabilities of recent versions of Linux (and other OSes). It is free software available under the GNU Lesser General Public License. Virtualization of the Linux Operating System means the ability to run multiple instances of Operating Systems concurently on a single hardware system where the basic resources are driven by a Linux (or Solaris) instance. The library aims at providing a long term stable C API initially for Xen paravirtualization but it can also integrate with other virtualization mechanisms. It currently also supports QEMU, KVM and OpenVZ.