automatically starting KVM

[Paul Dwerryhouse]

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