On Wednesday, 17 June 2020 20:55:19 BST J. Roeleveld wrote: > On 17 June 2020 21:32:19 CEST, Michael <confabul...@kintzios.com> wrote:
> This brings another problem I have with KVM/QEMU: all howtos and documents I
> find show long commandline options to just start the VM. I have not found
> one where I can provide all the config in a single file and use that.
> Allowing me to duplicate settings by simply copying the file and changing a
> few lines.
>
> KVM/Qemu seems to be written to be used together with virt-manager which,
> for me, lacks important features to make it usable in production.
>
> --
> Joost
The long line can be extremely short, if you are happy with defaults, or
silly-long if you have specific needs. The same long line can also go into a
script and invoked with bash. For example, this will boot a pfSense VM on an
EFI BIOS platform, 4G RAM and Opteron_G5-v1 CPU:
qemu-system-x86_64 -bios /usr/share/edk2-ovmf/OVMF_CODE.fd -m 4096 -cpu
Opteron_G5-v1,+topoext -smp cpus=4,maxcpus=8,cores=4,threads=2,sockets=1 -
enable-kvm -accel kvm,thread=multi -display sdl,gl=on -vga virtio -soundhw hda
-drive if=virtio,file=pfSense.qcow2,cache=none -usb -device qemu-xhci,id=xhci
-net nic,model=virtio -net user,hostfwd=tcp::53260-:443
or, you could set it all up in a script file, one or more lines at a time:
#!/bin/bash
#
qemu-system-x86_64 \
-bios /usr/share/edk2-ovmf/OVMF_CODE.fd \
-m 4096 \
-cpu Opteron_G5-v1,+topoext \
[snip ...]
Then call the script from a terminal whenever you want to run it. I prefer
using a script file when I experiment with new machines and options, because
it allows me to comment out options as I change them to alternatives and
backtrack as necessary.
If you prefer to use RHL's libvirt to execute in 'C' API calls onto QEMU/KVM,
then virt-manager will offer a VirtualBox GUI equivalent, or virsh a CLI
option. Virt-manager can be the front end for other hypervisors/VMs, e.g.
Xen, ESX, etc. so it is not QEMU/KVM specific.
QEMU also offers QMP for JSON scripting, because ... apps, and a rather basic
console interface called Human Monitor Interface (HMP), should you wish to
interact with it while it's running to modify inputs/interfaces, plug/unplug
devices, etc.
I'm not starting and stopping VMs all day long, so installing and running a
libvirt GUI, or some of the various front ends for QEMU has not been necessary
for me. However, they may offer more sophisticated options than my basic CLI
input above.
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