The virt-manager application is a desktop user interface for managing virtual machines through libvirt. It primarily targets KVM VMs, but also manages Xen and LXC (linux containers). It presents a summary view of running domains, their live performance and resource utilization statistics.
Wizards enable the creation of new domains, and configuration & adjustment of a domain’s resource allocation & virtual hardware. An embedded VNC and SPICE client viewer presents a full graphical console to the guest domain.
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- Create, edit, start and stop VMs
- View and control each VM’s console
- Access performance and utilization statistics for each VM
- View all running VMs and hosts, and their live performance or resource utilization statistics.
- Use KVM, Xen or QEMU virtual machines, running either locally or remotely.
- Use LXC containers.
- Supporting tools:
- virt-install – command line tool which provides an easy way to provision operating systems into virtual machines.
- virt-viewer – 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.
- virt-clone – command line tool for cloning existing inactive guests. It copies the disk images, and defines a config with new name, UUID and MAC address pointing to the copied disks.
- virt-xml – command line tool for easily editing libvirt domain XML using virt-install’s command line options.
- virt-bootstrap – command line tool providing an easy way to setup the root file system for libvirt-based containers.
Website: virt-manager.org
Support: GitHub Code Repository
Developer: Red Hat
License: GNU General Public License v2.0
virt-manager is written in Python. Learn Python with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| Container Managers | |
|---|---|
| Portainer | Lightweight and easy to use management UI |
| Podman | Tool for managing OCI containers and pods |
| LXD | Manage virtual machines and containers |
| Rancher | Container management platform |
| Mesos | Cluster manager |
| virt-manager | Desktop tool for managing virtual machines via libvirt |
| Cloudmin | Manage virtual systems running virtualization technology |
| Incus | Modern, secure and powerful system container and virtual machine manager |
| Pods | Manage your Podman containers |
| Cruise | Docker TUI client |
| Stakkr | Docker recompose tool |
| rkt | Application container engine |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
| Virtualization Tools | |
|---|---|
| VirtualBox | Powerful x86 and AMD64/Intel64 virtualization software |
| Quickemu | Wrapper for QEMU that automatically “does the right thing” |
| QEMU | Machine emulator and virtualizer |
| Boxes | View, access, and manage remote and virtual systems |
| virt-manager | Desktop tool for managing virtual machines via libvirt |
| Incus | Modern, secure and powerful system container and virtual machine manager |
| Quickgui | Gaphical user interface for the Quickemu virtual machine manager. |
| Cassowary | Run Windows virtual machine on Linux |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
 Explore our comprehensive directory of recommended free and open source software. Our carefully curated collection spans every major software category.This directory is part of our ongoing series of informative articles for Linux enthusiasts. It features hundreds of detailed reviews, along with open source alternatives to proprietary solutions from major corporations such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, IBM, Cisco, Oracle, and Autodesk. You’ll also find interesting projects to try, hardware coverage, free programming books and tutorials, and much more. Discovered a useful open source Linux program that we haven’t covered yet? Let us know by completing this form. |
I thought virt-man was on the way out/no longer being developed.
There hasn’t been a release for a couple of years but it’s still getting new commits.
Hi Lars. I see, thank you.