On 24/12/15 13:07, Russell Coker via luv-main wrote:
To run KVM virtual machines it seems to be recommended to un virsh which requires XML. Just having XML isn't necessarily a bad thing (XML is great for machine=>machine communication) but apparently you have to edit it yourself!
There's virt-console - obviously not the sort of thing you can do automation with, but it will let you quickly build and manage VMs, and gives you access to the most important settings. I'm not doing anything out of the ordinary with my home VMs and I don't think I've ever needed to manually adjust any of the XML files that it has generated. I can't really see a lot of reason to not use libvirt. It gives you a widely-supported interface, so that any code you write to control your VMs will also work if you use Xen, ESX, Virtualbox or even LXC (amongst others), as well as a good range of languages to write interfaces in. I did a quick apt-cache search for kvm and python/ruby and only found libraries that used libvirt, and no kvm-specific libs. While I'm sure there's someone out there who is writing APIs to control kvm directly in those languages, if people are only bothering to package the libvirt interfaces, it suggests to me that's where the support lies. Cheers, Paul