libvirt is an open-source API, daemon and management tool for managing platform virtualization. It can be used to manage KVM, Xen, VMware ESXi, QEMU and other virtualization technologies. These APIs are widely used in the orchestration layer of hypervisors in the development of a cloud-based solution.
Internals
libvirt is a C library with bindings in other languages, notably in Python, Perl, OCaml, Ruby, Java, JavaScript (via Node.js) and PHP. libvirt for these programming languages is composed of wrappers around another class/package called libvirtmod. libvirtmod's implementation is closely associated with its counterpart in C/C++ in syntax and functionality.
Supported Hypervisors LXC – lightweight Linux container system OpenVZ – lightweight Linux container system Kernel-based Virtual Machine/QEMU (KVM) – open-source hypervisor for Linux and SmartOS Xen – bare-metal hypervisor User-mode Linux (UML) – paravirtualized kernel VirtualBox – hypervisor by Oracle (formerly by Sun) for Windows, Linux, macOS, and Solaris VMware ESXi and GSX – hypervisors for Intel hardware VMware Workstation and Player – hypervisors for Windows and Linux Hyper-V – hypervisor for Windows by Microsoft PowerVM – hypervisor by IBM for AIX, Linux and IBM i
Bhyve – hypervisor for FreeBSD 10+ (support added with libvirt 1.2.2)
User Interfaces Various virtualization programs and platforms use libvirt. Virtual Machine Manager, GNOME Boxes and others provide graphical interfaces. The most popular command line interface is virsh, and higher level tools such as oVirt.
Corporate Development of libvirt is backed by Red Hat, with significant contributions by other organisations and individuals. libvirt is available on most Linux distributions; remote servers are also accessible from Apple and Microsoft Windows clients.
See also
SPICE libguestfs
References
Books
External links
Mailing lists