virt-manager Installation

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virt-manager is a virtual machine manager for Linux and can run both Linux and Windows virtual machines. Its main advantage is speed.

virt-manager

If you’re using Linux did you know that the Linux kernel already has virtual machine capability built in? You don’t need VM Ware, Virtual Box or any other hyper visor. The Linux Kernel can run your Linux or Windows virtual machines right out of the box.

Why use virt-manager?

virt-manager is built to manage QEMU/KVM hyper visor. The QEMU hyper visor can access hardware virtualisation natively via the Linux kernel which means that virtualisation should be a faster and more efficient than some thing like, say, Virtual Box

What do you need?

KVM will work on any Linux distribution but you need CPU hardware virtualisation support enabled. Use the following command to check that CPU virtualisation is enabled:

LC_ALL=C lscpu | grep Virtualization

A positive response of a value is what you’re looking for. For example, for Intel systems the following:

Virtualization:                  VT-x

If nothing is shown, you need to enable CPU virtualisation in your BIOS.

How to install virt-manager

Install packages

The following is for Debian/Ubuntu based systems.

sudo apt install libvirt qemu virt-manager ebtables

Enable and start services

sudo systemctl enable libvirtd
sudo systemctl start libvirtd

Check the status of service

sudo systemctl start libvirtd

Should return something like:

ibvirtd.service - Virtualization daemon
   Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/libvirtd.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
   Active: active (running) since Sun 2020-04-19 11:21:43 BST; 1 day 3h ago
     Docs: man:libvirtd(8)
           https://libvirt.org
 Main PID: 2067 (libvirtd)
    Tasks: 19 (limit: 32768)
   Memory: 59.9M
   CGroup: /system.slice/libvirtd.service
           ├─2067 /usr/sbin/libvirtd
           ├─2290 /usr/sbin/dnsmasq --conf-file=/var/lib/libvirt/dnsmasq/default.conf --leasefile-ro --dhcp-script=/usr/lib/libvirt/libvirt_leaseshelper
           └─2291 /usr/sbin/dnsmasq --conf-file=/var/lib/libvirt/dnsmasq/default.conf --leasefile-ro --dhcp-script=/usr/lib/libvirt/libvirt_leaseshelper

Set permissions

To run virt-manager, your user needs to be a member of the libvert group.

sudo usermod -aG libvirt {your user}

How to run virt-manager

Now simply run virt-manager from your desktop launcher.

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