Libvirt provides a portable, long term stable C API for managing the
virtualization technologies provided by many operating systems. It
includes support for QEMU, KVM, Xen, LXC, bhyve, Virtuozzo, VMware
vCenter and ESX, VMware Desktop, Hyper-V, VirtualBox and the POWER
Hypervisor.
A number of the libvirt APIs require the use of cgroups. This is not
enabled by default on a RHEL6 install. After discussion with cgroups
team, it was decided that upon installation of the libvirt RPM, we
should automatically turn on the cgroups service. This will activate a
default configuration that turns on all cgroups controllers libvirt
requires for full operation.
LibVirt : simple API for virtualization
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 concurrently on a single hardware system where the basic
resources are driven by a Linux instance. The library aim at providing
long term stable C API initially for the Xen paravirtualization but
should be able to integrate other virtualization mechanisms if needed.
Daniel Veillard <veillard@redhat.com>