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Creating a virtual machine using libvirt

libvirt is a general interface for virtualisation on linux; these are some notes I made when creating and loading an alpine linux vm on the command line.

Obviously, you'll want to download the installation media, I've picked alpine linux for this:

wget https://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/v3.14/releases/x86_64/alpine-standard-3.14.3-x86_64.iso
wget https://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/v3.14/releases/x86_64/alpine-virt-3.14.3-x86_64.iso

Pick the version you need - the 'virt' one enables serial by default and so is the one we will use.

Two important commands to use:

virt-install actually does the installations and setting up the vm.
virsh is the command line interface for everything else.
osinfo-query, to help pick a suitable OS type for virt-install
virt-viewer to sort out the display for the vm, though it does not appear to actually be used on the command line.

virt-install likes to know the type of OS we are installing, so lets find out:

osinfo-query os | less

"alpinelinux3.8" seems to be closest to the 3.14, so lets use that.

Command I'm using to create the VM is therefore as follows:

virt-install --memory 8000 --os-variant alpinelinux3.8 --cdrom alpine-virt-3.14.3-x86_64.iso --disk none --display none \
  --disk path=alpine.qcow2,size=20,format=qcow2

Note that every time you run the above command, a running instance will generally be added to the VM list, which libvirt describes as "running domains"

Listing VM's

virsh list

Deleting VM's

First, obtain the domain name from the vm list, then undefine it

virsh undefine NAME

Reconnecting to a VM's serial console

virsh console ID