libvirt: Applications using libvirt
Description: libvirt, virtualization, virtualization API

# Applications using libvirt

This page provides an illustration of the wide variety of applications using the libvirt management API.

- Add an application
- Client/Server applications
- Command line tools
- Configuration Management
- Continuous Integration
- Conversion
- Desktop applications
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
- Libraries
- LiveCD / Appliances
- Monitoring
- Provisioning
- Web applications
- Mobile applications

## Add an application

To add an application not listed on this page, send a message to the mailing list, requesting it be added here, or simply send a patch against the documentation in the libvirt.git docs subdirectory. If your application uses libvirt as its API, the following graphic is available for your website to advertise support for libvirt:

## Client/Server applications

Archipel
  Archipel is a libvirt-based solution to manage and supervise virtual machines. It uses XMPP for all communication. There is no web service or custom protocol. You just need at least one XMPP server, like eJabberd, to start playing with it. This allows Archipel to work completely real time. You never have to refresh the user interface, you'll be notified as soon as something happens. You can even use your favorite chat clients to command your infrastructure.
  Isn't it great to be able to open a chat conversation with your virtual machine and say things like "How are you today?" or "Hey, please reboot"?

## Command line tools

guestfish
  Guestfish is an interactive shell and command-line tool for examining and modifying virtual machine filesystems. It uses libvirt to find guests and their associated disks.
virsh
  An interactive shell, and batch scriptable tool for performing management tasks on all libvirt managed domains, networks and storage. This is part of the libvirt core distribution.
virt-clone
  Allows the disk image(s) and configuration for an existing virtual machine to be cloned to form a new virtual machine. It automates copying of data across to new disk images, and updates the UUID, MAC address, and name in the configuration.
virt-df
  Examine the utilization of each filesystem in a virtual machine from the comfort of the host machine. This tool peeks into the guest disks and determines how much space is used. It can cope with common Linux filesystems and LVM volumes.
virt-image
  Provides a way to deploy virtual appliances. It defines a simplified portable XML format describing the pre-requisites of a virtual machine. At time of deployment this is translated into the domain XML format for execution under any libvirt hypervisor meeting the pre-requisites.
virt-install
  Provides a way to provision new virtual machines from a OS distribution install tree. It supports provisioning from local CD images, and the network over NFS, HTTP and FTP.
virt-top
  Watch the CPU, memory, network and disk utilization of all virtual machines running on a host.
virt-what
  virt-what is a shell script for detecting if the program is running in a virtual machine. It prints out a list of facts about the virtual machine, derived from heuristics.

## Configuration Management

LCFG
  LCFG is a system for automatically installing and managing the configuration of large numbers of Unix systems. It is particularly suitable for sites with very diverse and rapidly changing configurations.
  The lcfg-libvirt package adds support for virtualized systems to LCFG, with both Xen and KVM known to work. Cloning guests is supported, as are the bridged, routed, and isolated modes for Virtual Networking.

## Continuous Integration

BuildBot
  BuildBot is a system to automate the compile/test cycle required by most software projects. CVS commits trigger new builds, run on a variety of client machines. Build status (pass/fail/etc) are displayed on a web page or through other protocols.

Jenkins
  This plugin for Jenkins adds a way to control guest domains hosted on Xen or QEMU/KVM. You configure a Jenkins Slave, selecting the guest domain and hypervisor. When you need to build a job on a specific Slave, its guest domain is started, then the job is run. When the build process is finished, the guest domain is shut down, ready to be used again as required.

## Conversion

Poor mans p2v
  A simple approach for converting a physical machine to a virtual machine, using a rescue CD.
virt-p2v
  An older tool for converting a physical machine into a virtual machine. It is a LiveCD which is booted on the machine to be converted. It collects a little information from the user, then copies the disks over to a remote machine and defines the XML for a domain to run the guest.
virt-v2v
  virt-v2v converts guests from a foreign hypervisor to run on KVM, managed by libvirt. It can currently convert Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and Fedora guests running on Xen and VMware ESX. It will enable VirtIO drivers in the converted guest if possible.
  For RHEL customers of Red Hat, conversion of Windows guests is also possible. This conversion requires some Microsoft signed pieces, that Red Hat can provide.
vmware2libvirt
  Part of the virt-goodies package, vmware2libvirt is a python script for migrating a vmware image to libvirt.

## Desktop applications

virt-manager
  A general purpose desktop management tool, able to manage virtual machines across both local and remotely accessed hypervisors. It is targeted at home and small office usage up to managing 10-20 hosts and their VMs.
virt-viewer
  A lightweight tool for accessing the graphical console associated with a virtual machine. It can securely connect to remote consoles supporting the VNC protocol. Also provides an optional mozilla browser plugin.

## Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

Cracow Cloud One
  The CC1 system provides a complete solution for Private Cloud Computing. An intuitive web access interface with an administration module and simple installation procedure make it easy to benefit from private Cloud Computing technology.
EMOTIVE Cloud
  The EMOTIVE (Elastic Management Of Tasks In Virtualized Environments) middleware allows executing tasks and providing virtualized environments to the users with Xen, KVM or VirtualBox hypervisor. EMOTIVE's main feature is VM management with different scheduling policies. It can be also used as a cloud provider and is very easy to extend thanks to its modular Web Services architecture.
Eucalyptus
  Eucalyptus is an on-premise Infrastructure as a Service cloud software platform that is open source and AWS-compatible. Eucalyptus uses libivrt virtualization API to directly interact with Xen and KVM hypervisors.
Nimbus
  Nimbus is an open-source toolkit focused on providing Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) capabilities to the scientific community. It uses libvirt for communication with all KVM and Xen virtual machines.
Snooze
  Snooze is an open-source scalable, autonomic, and energy-efficient virtual machine (VM) management framework for private clouds. It integrates libvirt for VM monitoring, live migration, and life-cycle management.
OpenStack
  OpenStack is a "cloud operating system" usable for both public and private clouds. Its various parts take care of compute, storage and networking resources and interface with the user using a dashboard. Compute part uses libvirt to manage VM life-cycle, monitoring and so on.

## Libraries

libguestfs
  A library and set of tools for accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images. It can be linked with C and C++ management programs, and has bindings for Perl, Python, Ruby, Java, OCaml, PHP, Haskell, and C#.
  Using its FUSE module, you can also mount guest filesystems on the host, and there is a subproject to allow merging changes into the Windows Registry in Windows guests.

Ruby Libvirt Object bindings
  Allows using simple ruby objects to manipulate hypervisors, guests, storage, network etc. It is based on top of the native ruby bindings.

## LiveCD / Appliances

virt-p2v
  An older tool for converting a physical machine into a virtual machine. It is a LiveCD which is booted on the machine to be converted. It collects a little information from the user, then copies the disks over to a remote machine and defines the XML for a domain to run the guest.

## Monitoring

collectd
  The libvirt-plugin is part of collectd and gathers statistics about virtualized guests on a system. This way, you can collect CPU, network interface and block device usage for each guest without installing collectd on the guest systems. For a full description, please refer to the libvirt section in the collectd.conf(5) manual page.
Munin
  The plugins provided by Guido Günther allow to monitor various things like network and block I/O with Munin.
Nagios-virt
  Nagios-virt is a configuration tool to add monitoring of your virtualised domains to Nagios. You can use this tool to either set up a new Nagios installation for your Xen or QEMU/KVM guests, or to integrate with your existing Nagios installation.
Zenoss
  The Zenoss libvirt Zenpack adds support for monitoring virtualization servers. It has been tested with KVM, QEMU, VMware ESX, and VMware GSX.

## Provisioning

Tivoli Provisioning Manager
  Part of the IBM Tivoli family, Tivoli Provisioning Manager (TPM) is an IT lifecycle automation product. It uses libvirt for communication with virtualization hosts and guest domains.

Foreman
  Foreman is an open source web based application aimed to be a Single Address For All Machines Life Cycle Management. Foreman:
  - Creates everything you need when adding a new machine to your network, its goal being automatically managing everything you would normally manage manually (DNS, DHCP, TFTP, Virtual Machines,CA, CMDB...)
  - Integrates with Puppet (and acts as web front end to it).
  - Takes care of provisioning until the point puppet is running, allowing Puppet to do what it does best.
  - Shows you Systems Inventory (based on Facter) and provides real time information about hosts status based on Puppet reports.

## Web applications

AbiCloud
  AbiCloud is an open source cloud platform manager which allows to easily deploy a private cloud in your datacenter. One of the key differences of AbiCloud is the web rich interface for managing the infrastructure. You can deploy a new service just dragging and dropping a VM.
oVirt
  oVirt provides the ability to manage large numbers of virtual machines across an entire data center of hosts. It integrates with FreeIPA for Kerberos authentication, and in the future, certificate management.

## Mobile applications

VM Manager
  VM Manager is VM (libvirt) manager (over SSH) application. VM Manager is an application for libvirt VM / Domain management over SSH. Please keep in mind that this software is under heavy development.