About virt-manager’s supporting tools. Virt-install is a command line tool which provides an easy way to provision operating systems into virtual machines. Virt-viewer is a lightweight UI interface for interacting with the graphical display of virtualized guest OS. Virt-manager.org Virtual Machine Manager (virt-manager) is based on libvirt and supports several Hypervisors In computing, the Red Hat Virtual Machine Manager, also known as virt-manager, is a desktop virtual machine monitor. About virt-manager’s supporting tools. Virt-install is a command line tool which provides an easy way to provision operating systems into virtual machines. Virt-viewer is a lightweight UI interface for interacting with the graphical display of virtualized guest OS. It can display VNC or SPICE, and uses libvirt to lookup the graphical connection details.

As we all know that the VMware and VirtualBox are not the only Virtualization software to create Virtual Machines on Linux. There are few others such as Qemu & KVM. These are the most popular command-line tools to create virtual or delete virtual machines. So, being a command-line tool, it becomes very difficult for both professional and beginner users of Linux to handle them. Since the long command to create and run Virtual Machines on Linux or Ubuntu is hard to remember. To solve this problem there are a variety of Virtual Manager tools are available and one of them is the Virt Manager.

Now, What is the Virt Manager?

The Virt Manager is an open-source application that is meant to provide a Graphical user interface to Virtualization software like QEMU/KVM. It is particularly meant to manage the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) using libvirt bin. However, other projects such as Xen and LXC (Linux containers) can be managed too. It provides users with a summary of their running VMs including live performance and resource utilization stats of them.

If you haven’t installed the Qemu on your system, yet, then here is the tutorial on it: Qemu Ubuntu Tutorial

So, I assumed that you already have the Qemu or KVM on your Ubuntu system. And now looking for a way to install the Virt-Manager Virtual machine manager for Ubuntu.

Here we are using Ubuntu 18.04 to install Virt-manager but the command the will be same of the older version such as Ubuntu 17.04, 16.04, 15.04…

Steps to install Virt Manager on Ubuntu via command line

1. Go to your Ubuntuserver or Desktop.
2. Open the Ubuntu Command Terminal. Shortcut for that is CTRL+ALT+T
3. To install the Virt manager run the following command
4. After the above command go to the applications and you will Virt Manager icon.
5. Click on the Virt icon and start creating a virtual machine.

To increase the performance of Qemu on Virt Manager it’s recommended to install the KVM too.

For that first of all check, whether your machine’s CPU supports the KVM or not.

1. The command to check the KVM compatibility:

2. If your machine CPU supports the KVM then run the given command to install it:

1. Choose the medium to install the operating system. The options are Local install media (ISO image or CD-ROM), Network Install (HTTP, FTP or NFS), Network Boot (PXE), and Import existing disk image.
2. If you want to install using ISO image then select that option and click on the Forward button.
3. Browse the ISO image
4. Set the Memory (RAM) and number of CPU
5. Assign the amount of virtual hard disk space you want to give to your VM.
6. Name your Virtual machine and click on the Finish button.

Uninstall the Virt-manager

In case you want to remove the Virt Manager GUI tool from Ubuntu then execute the following command in a command terminal.

In this way, the user can install the Virt- Manager on Ubuntu.

Other resources to read:

If you plan to create a virtual machine image on a machine thatcan run X11 applications, the simplest way to do so is to usethe virt-manager GUI, which is installable as thevirt-manager package on both Fedora-based and Debian-based systems.This GUI has an embedded VNC client that will let you view andinteract with the guest’s graphical console.

If you are building the image on a headless server, andyou have an X server on your local machine, you can launchvirt-manager using ssh X11 forwarding to access the GUI.Since virt-manager interacts directly with libvirt, you typicallyneed to be root to access it. If you can ssh directly in as root(or with a user that has permissions to interact with libvirt), do:

If the account you use to ssh into your server does not havepermissions to run libvirt, but has sudo privileges, do:

Note

Virt-manager Efi

The -X flag passed to ssh will enable X11 forwarding over ssh.If this does not work, try replacing it with the -Y flag.

Click the Create a new virtual machine button at the top-left,or go to File ‣ New Virtual Machine. Then, follow theinstructions.

You will be shown a series of dialog boxes that will allow youto specify information about the virtual machine.

Note

Virt-manager Cannot Open Display

When using qcow2 format images, you should check the optionCustomizeconfigurationbeforeinstall, go to disk properties andexplicitly select the qcow2 format.This ensures the virtual machine disk size will be correct.