The virtualization API

libvirt is:

• A toolkit to interact with the virtualization capabilities of recent versions of Linux (and other OSes).
• Free software available under the GNU Lesser General Public License.
• A long term stable C API
• A set of bindings for common languages
• A CIM provider for the DMTF virtualization schema
• A QMF agent for the AMQP/QPid messaging system

libvirt supports:

• The Xen hypervisor on Linux and Solaris hosts.
• The QEMU emulator
• The KVM Linux hypervisor
• The LXC Linux container system
• The OpenVZ Linux container system
• The User Mode Linux paravirtualized kernel
• The VirtualBox hypervisor
• The VMware ESX and GSX hypervisors
• The VMware Workstation and Player hypervisors
• Storage on IDE/SCSI/USB disks, FibreChannel, LVM, iSCSI, NFS and filesystems

libvirt provides:

• Remote management using TLS encryption and x509 certificates
• Remote management authenticating with Kerberos and SASL
• Local access control using PolicyKit
• Zero-conf discovery using Avahi multicast-DNS
• Management of virtual machines, virtual networks and storage
• Portable client API for Linux, Solaris and Windows