kvm-install-vm

A bash wrapper around virt-install to build virtual machines on a local KVM hypervisor. You can run it as a normal user which will use qemu:///session to connect locally to your KVM domains.

Tested on the latest Fedora.

Prerequisites

You need to have the KVM hypervisor installed, along with a few other packages (naming of packages can differ on other distributions):

• virt-install >= 3.0.0
• libguestfs-tools-c
• qemu-img
• libvirt-client
• libosinfo

To install the dependencies, run:

• Fedora example:

sudo dnf -y install virt-install libguestfs-tools-c qemu-img libvirt-client wget libosinfo

• Ubuntu example:

sudo apt install -y virtinst libguestfs-tools qemu-utils libvirt-clients wget libosinfo-bin

If you want to resolve guests by their hostnames, install the libvirt-nss package:

• Fedora example:

sudo dnf -y install libvirt-nss

• Ubuntu example:

sudo apt install -y libnss-libvirt

Then, add libvirt and libvirt_guest to list of hosts databases in /etc/nsswitch.conf. See here for more information.

Usage

./kvm-install-vm help

Creating Guest VMs

# Create VM with the default parameters: Rocky Linux 9, 1 vCPU, 1.5GB RAM, 10GB disk capacity, x86_64 arch
kvm-install-vm create myvm

# Create VM with custom parameters: 2 vCPUs, 2GB RAM, and 20GB disk capacity.
kvm-install-vm create -c 2 -m 2048 -d 20 myvm

# Create a Debian 12 VM with the default parameters.
kvm-install-vm create -t debian12 myvm

# Create a default VM with UTC timezone.
kvm-install-vm create -T UTC myvm

Deleting a Guest Domain

# Remove (destroy and undefine) a guest domain. WARNING: This will delete the guest domain and any changes made inside it!
kvm-install-vm remove myvm

Attaching a new disk

# Attach a 10GB disk device named example-5g.qcow2 to the myvm guest domain.
kvm-install-vm attach-disk -d 10 -s example-5g.qcow2 -t vdb myvm

Setting Custom Defaults

Copy the .kivrc file to your $HOME directory to set custom defaults. This is convenient if you find yourself repeatedly setting the same options on the command line, like the distribution or the number of vCPUs.

Options are evaluated in the following order:

• Default options set in the script
• Custom options set in .kivrc
• Option flags set on the command line

Notes

1. This script will download a qcow2 cloud image from the respective distribution's download site. See script for URLs.

2. If using libvirt-nss, keep in mind that DHCP leases take some time to expire, so if you create a VM, delete it, and recreate another VM with the same name in a short period of time, there will be two DHCP leases for the same host and its hostname will likely not resolve until the old lease expires.

3. The Operating System information database (osinfo-db) provides Operating System specific information needed to create guests for the various systems supported by kvm-install-vm. The database files provided by your package manager may be out of date and not provide definitions for recent Operating System versions. If you encounter the following error message, you may need to update the database files: ERR: Unknown OS variant '<name>'. Please update your osinfo-db. If you have already updated your system, and the osinfo-db is still to old, then you can use the osinfo-db-import tool with the --local option, to install an up-to-date database in your home directory which will not conflict with your package manager files. The osinfo-db-import tool is provided by the rpm/deb packages osinfo-db-tools. See https://libosinfo.org/download for more information.

Testing

Tests are written using Bats. To execute the tests, run ./test.sh in the root directory of the project.

Use Cases

If you don't need to use Docker or Vagrant, don't want to make changes to a production machine, want to tinker with the kernel or systemd, or just want to spin up one or more VMs locally to test things like:

• high availability
• clustering
• package installs
• preparing for exams
• checking for system defaults
• anything else you would do with a VM

...then this wrapper could be useful for you.

Troubleshooting

If you will encounter something similar:

ERR: Unknown OS variant 'fedora31'. Please update your osinfo-db.  See https://libosinfo.org/download for more information.

Then you need to update the DB in libosinfo. Check the url and select the latest date ( https://releases.pagure.org/libosinfo/ )

wget -O "/tmp/osinfo-db.tar.xz" https://releases.pagure.org/libosinfo/osinfo-db-20200515.tar.xz
sudo osinfo-db-import --local "/tmp/osinfo-db.tar.xz"