links for 2009-12-14

virt-image(1) relies on an XML descriptor to create virtual machines from virtual machine images. In general, a virtual machine image consists of the XML descriptor (usually in a file image.xml) and a number of files for the virtual machine's disks.

Unlike virt-manager, virt-install is a command line tool that allows you to create KVM guests on a headless server. You may ask yourself: "But I can use vmbuilder to do this, why do I need virt-install?" The difference between virt-install and vmbuilder is that vmbuilder is for creating Ubuntu-based guests, whereas virt-install lets you install all kinds of operating systems (e.g. Linux, Windows, Solaris, FreeBSD, OpenBSD) and distributions in a guest, just like virt-manager. This article shows how you can use it on an Ubuntu 8.10 KVM server.