rootninja

I’m in the middle of working from the command line in a remote ssh session on a virtual machine host that runs two virtual machines. For reasons unclear at this time, I can’t list domains, interfaces, volumes, or anything from virsh on the host. However, I can still start and stop virtual machines and flag them for autostart and all I need to do right now is start a vm.

Here’s what I see when I run virsh and type list:

# virsh
Welcome to virsh, the virtualization interactive terminal.

Type:  'help' for help with commands
   'quit' to quit

virsh # list
 Id Name                 State
----------------------------------

Nothing there. I was expecting to see the same two virtual machines by name that I see from virt-manager. But i’m stuck on a console with no display available right now. virt-manager is not an option. I know there are other vm managers available that may be browser based or whatever, but I don’t have them installed.

Although virsh won’t let me query much information, I do know the names of the machines I wish to start and I have a simple ssh shell on the host machine. So lets give it a shot.

dontpanic@host:~# virsh autostart vm1
Domain vm1 marked as autostarted

dontpanic@host:~# virsh start vm1
Domain vm1 started

Everything went better than expected. So if you’re used to working in a virtual machine manager GUI but for whatever reason you can’t/won’t, give the virtual shell “virsh” a try.

If you’re on a debian based system, virsh is found in the libvirt-bin package. If you’re on an rpm based system, it’s in libvirt-client.