virt-install is an amazing tool to create VMs. If you have created a config file (Kickstart file – ks.cfg), then its only one line un-attended install. If you are using this on remote host with ssh and unluckily cannot export display – what do you do. Do a non-graphical install. There are only minor changes in the command to tell the installer that there is no graphics available and it is amazing, is it not 🙂
Continue readingLike ova images, you can use box images as well with Qemu. After all, both have the disk images, so here is the script to do that. Just put the script somewhere in your path and run with ova or box image name :
#!/bin/bash -
#===============================================================================
#
# FILE: ova2vm.sh
#
# USAGE: ./ova2vm.sh
#
# DESCRIPTION:
#
# OPTIONS: ---
# REQUIREMENTS: ---
# BUGS: ---
# NOTES: ---
# AUTHOR: Amit Agarwal (aka),
# ORGANIZATION: Mobileum
# CREATED: 12/28/2017 13:59
# Last modified: Sun Mar 11, 2018 12:01PM
# REVISION: ---
#===============================================================================
set -o nounset # Treat unset variables as an error
dest='/mnt/Backup/VM'
ORIG=${PWD}
if [[ $# == 0 ]]
then
echo "You need to provide ova/vmdk filename"
exit
fi
if [[ $1 == *ova || $1 == *box ]]
then
tmp=$(mktemp -d /tmp/amitXXXXXXX)
cd $tmp
tar xvf $ORIG/$1
file=$(echo $PWD/*vmdk)
else
file=$1
echo "Not a OVA file"
fi
dfile="$dest/$(basename $file)"
read -p "Enter the name for VM :: " vmname
qemu-img convert $file $dfile -p -c -O qcow2
virt-install --disk $dfile --ram 512 \
--virt-type kvm --vcpus 1 --name "$vmname" --import
Lot of times I find myself of VM that does not correctly resize the screen display and that is literally nuisance. So, here is quick and dirty fix for this.
First you need to find out information about your display with following command:
xrandr -q
And you will see output like this:
Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1920 x 1080, maximum 8192 x 8192
Continue reading
Virtual-0 connected primary 1920×1080+0+0 0mm x 0mm
1024×768 59.92 +
1920×1200 59.88
1920×1080 59.96*
1600×1200 59.87
1680×1050 59.95
1400×1050 59.98
1280×1024 59.89
1440×900 59.89
1280×960 59.94
1280×854 59.89
1280×800 59.81
1280×720 59.86
1152×768 59.78
800×600 59.86
848×480 59.66
720×480 59.71
640×480 59.38
Virtual-1 disconnected
Virtual-2 disconnected
Virtual-3 disconnected
To install a VM from command line, you can use the following command. Change the required parameters as need but you need to change at-least CDROM iso image and disk-path.
virt-install \
-n myVM \
--description "Test VM" \
--os-type=Linux \
--os-variant=centos7 \
--ram=2048 \
--vcpus=2 \
--disk path=./myVM.img,bus=virtio,size=10 \
--graphics none \
--cdrom <Image installtion CDROM>.iso \
--net user
If you need to have a quick bash shell in sandbox with not network as well, then the most simple command I could find so far is:
sudo virt-sandbox -c lxc:/// /bin/bash
For this you will need to have libvirt-sandbox installed which you can do with the following command:
sudo yum install libvirt-sandbox
If you are using the libvirt and associated tools, then you must be aware about virt-manager. However this being a GUI tools, it is not possible to always use this. “virsh” is a good option for this.
To start with, if you need to know all the VMs all the running VMs, then you can use (to only view the names):
virsh list --name
Extending this to make it more useful is the case if you need to know the IP address for the running VMs. Here is a simple code that you can put in alias or function that can be used to get the IP address of the running VM’s.
Continue readingWhen you search with “docker search”, you would notice that the description of the image is truncated. Sometimes you want to see full description, to do so, you can use –no-trunc option. So, for example you want to search for fedora images, you can use the following command:
docker search --no-trunc fedora