Applications using libvirt

This page provides an illustration of the wide variety of applications using the libvirt management API. If you know of interesting applications not listed on this page, send a message to the mailing list to request that it be added here. If your application uses libvirt as its API, the following graphic is available for your website to advertise support for libvirt:

Command line tools

virsh

An interactive shell, and batch scriptable tool for performing management tasks on all libvirt managed domains, networks and storage. This is part of the libvirt core distribution.

virt-install

Provides a way to provision new virtual machines from a OS distribution install tree. It supports provisioning from local CD images, and the network over NFS, HTTP and FTP.

virt-clone

Allows the disk image(s) and configuration for an existing virtual machine to be cloned to form a new virtual machine. It automates copying of data across to new disk images, and updates the UUID, Mac address and name in the configuration

virt-image

Provides a way to deploy virtual appliances. It defines a simplified portable XML format describing the pre-requisites of a virtual machine. At time of deployment this is translated into the domain XML format for execution under any libvirt hypervisor meeting the pre-requisites.

virt-df

Examine the utilization of each filesystem in a virtual machine from the comfort of the host machine. This tool peeks into the guest disks and determines how much space is used. It can cope with common Linux filesystems and LVM volumes.

virt-top

Watch the CPU, memory, network and disk utilization of all virtual machines running on a host.

Desktop applications

virt-manager

A general purpose desktop management tool, able to manage virtual machines across both local and remotely accessed hypervisors. It is targeted at home and small office usage upto managing 10-20 hosts and their VMs.

virt-viewer

A lightweight tool for accessing the graphical console associated with a virtual machine. It can securely connect to remote consoles supporting the VNC protocol. Also provides an optional mozilla browser plugin.

Web applications

oVirt

oVirt provides the ability to manage large numbers of virtual machines across an entire data center of hosts. It integrates with FreeIPA for Kerberos authentication, and in the future, certificate management.

AbiCloud

AbiCloud is an open source cloud platform manager which allows to easily deploy a private cloud in your datacenter. One of the key differences of AbiCloud is the web rich interface for managing the infrastructure. You can deploy a new service just dragging and dropping a VM.

LiveCD / Appliances

virt-p2v

A tool for converting a physical machine into a virtual machine. It is a LiveCD which is booted on the machine to be converted. It collects a little information from the user and then copies the disks over to a remote machine and defines the XML for a domain to run the guest.

Monitoring plugins

for munin

The plugins provided by Guido Günther allow to monitor various things like network and block I/O with Munin.

for collectd

The libvirt-plugin is part of collectd and gather statistics about virtualized guests on a system. This way, you can collect CPU, network interface and block device usage for each guest without installing collectd on the guest systems. or a full description of available please refer to the libvirt section in the collectd.conf(5) manual page.

nagios-virt

Nagios-virt is a configuration tool for adding monitoring of your virtualised domains to Nagios. You can use this tool to either set up a new Nagios installation for your Xen or QEMU/KVM guests, or to integrate with your existing Nagios installation.