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.

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