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Configure A Physical Machine To Host Virtual Guests
General Information
Yum groups can save you time, as long as you have access to a repo that has the groups defined. This may NOT be the case on an exam.
Installing and Starting KVM
Install packages for VM installs, hardware emulation, imaging
- CLI packages
yum install virt-install qemu-kvm qemu-img
- virt-install: VM creation
- qemu-kvm: Provides hardware emulation for the KVM hypervisor
- qemu-img: Disk image utility
- GUI packages
yum install virt-manager
- virt-manager is only needed if you want the GUI Virtual Machine Manager application to create/control VMs.
- CLI and GUI packages group
yum groupinstall "Virtualization Client"
- Will install all of the above (and probably extras)
Management packages
yum install libvirt libvirt-client libvirt-python OR yum groupinstall "Virtualization Platform"
- libvirt packages allow interacting with virtual guests/managing virtual machines
- libvirt: Interact with virtualization via an API
- libvirt-client: Client binaries to access virtualization (provides virsh CLI VM management utility)
- libvirt-python: Module for Python programs to access virtualization
Enable/Start libvirtd - Daemon required to manage virtualization
systemctl enable libvirtd
systemctl start libvirtd
Two ways to manage VMs
- virt-manager ⇒ GUI
- virsh ⇒ command line