John Siu Blog

Some KVM frequently used commands.

Connection string

virsh and virt-manager use same connection string.

• Local

  1	virsh -c qemu:///system

• Remote

  1	virsh -c qemu+ssh://user@hostname/system

• Remote from MacOS

  1	virsh -c qemu+ssh://user@hostname/system?socket=/var/run/libvirt/libvirt-sock

VM

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virsh list      # List running VMs only
virsh list -all # List VMs regardless of running state
virsh list --with-snapshot

virsh start <vm name>
virsh stop <vm name>

Snapshot

• List

  1	virsh snapshot-list <vm name>

• Create

  1 2	virsh snapshot-create -domain <vm name> virsh snapshot-create-as --domain <vm name> --name <snapshot name>

• Revert

  1	virsh snapshot-revert <vm name> <snapshot name>

• Delete

  1	virsh snapshot-delete --snapshotname <snapshot name> <vm name>

Network

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virsh net-list
virsh net-list --all

Pool and Vol

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virsh pool-list
virsh pool-list --all

virsh vol-list <pool name>
virsh vol-list default

Image

• Create

  1 2	qemu-img create -f <format> <filename> <size> qemu-img create -f qcow2 ubuntu.img 500M

  vmdk(vmware) and vdi(virtualbox) are supported.

• Snapshot

  1	qemu-img create -f qcow2 -b ubuntu.master.qcow2 ubuntu.qcow2

• Info

  1	qemu-img info <filename>

• Resize

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  qemu-img resize <filename> [+|-]<size> qemu-img resize ubuntu.img 550M # set image to new size, use --shrink if new size is smaller qemu-img resize ubuntu.img +10M # increase image size by 10M qemu-img resize --shrink ubuntu.img -10M # decrease image size by 10M

  Check Linux Commands for resizing partition after an image resize.