Virtual Machines with libvirt/KVM/QEMU

The information and instructions below are for to Ubuntu 18.04 and 20.04, but most of it probably applies to other Linux systems too.

= Installing the libvirt/KVM/QEMU Software =

In order to install libvirt/KVM/QEMU, install the following packages:

libvirt-bin libvirt-doc

The GUI tool will probably be helpful too, but if you are installing on a headless server, you can use the GUI from your workstation too. The package is:

virt-manager

If you are using Cockpit, install this package to see the VMs on the web interface:

cockpit-machines

After installing libvirt, log off and on again, so that your user account becomes a member of the libvirt group. I had once trouble connecting to the daemon socket with the virt-manager GUI, even though the user was effectively a member of 'libvirt'. I had to reboot the entire system, and then it worked.