kvm-wrapper

Description

kvm-wrapper is (yet another) virtual machines manager, to be used with KVM. It intends to be lightweight, simple (and hackable), and started as a tiny wrapper for personnal use. kvm-wrapper is written in shellscript only.

Features

• Start/stop a virtual machine.
• Start the VM in a screen, and attach it (to access to its console)
• Basic network handling (connect the VM to one or multiple bridges)
• Create/remove a VM and its associated disks (lvm or formats supported by qemu-img) easily.
• Bootstrap a VM (a debian bootstrap script is included, but it's easy to add others)
• Connect to qemu-kvm's monitor and to the VM serial console.
• Autostart VMs at startup if configured to.
• Minimal server clustering support (if the disks are available on both hosts, can failover using kvm migrate)
• bash completion :)

Download

kvm-wrapper is still under developpement, but no major changes are planned for the moment.
If you have anything to ask please do so by sending a mail or via irc (contact at the bottom of the page)

The source code is available with git, either browsable at http://cgit.notk.org/gitolite/kvm-wrapper.git/ or clonable:

git clone http://git.notk.org/gitolite/kvm-wrapper.git

There is no and won't be any install script. The default working directory is to put everything in /usr/share/kvm-wrapper and to make a symlink to kvm-wrapper.sh from /usr/bin/kvm-wrapper; but it can be changed with the ROOTDIR variable in kvm-wrapper.sh
You will also need a set of vmlinuz and initrd to bootstrap your debian VMs, you can make your own, but you can find some here. I'll let you read the .conf and the errors to see what to do with these.

Dependencies

kvm-wrapper uses a few unix programs to manage everything

• qemu-kvm, obviously (preferably >= 0.15)
• bash (heavy bash-specific code inside)
• either dtach or GNU screen
• socat
• lvm2 tools, if you plan to use lvm (kvm offers better performance with it)
• kpartx and debootstrap, for bootstrap scripts

Licensing

kvm-wrapper is under WTFPL(v2), so just do whatever the fuck you want with this.

If you are using it, we would be glad to hear from you!

-- kvm-wrapper, 2010-2020