Good virt-manager guide?

Software & Operating Systems Open Source & Web-Based
1

Hey, I’m new here (and new to linux). I was hoping someone might be able to help point me to a good guide to help me educate myself with virt-manager/qemu/kvm. I was dual-booting linux and windows for a while, now linux host windows guest vm with virtual box, but I wanted to give virt-manager a shot.

Any thoughts, comments, recommendations are appreciated. Thanks so much!

2

Welcome to the forum!

Virt-manager itself, not really. There should be some guides out there, but virt-manager is easy to get into. For GPU passthrough, I suggest you follow a few of the passthrough guides.

I cannot seem to find the one with CPU pinning, but I remember Wendell did a wiki for that, but I don’t know if it was one of the many Fedora VFIO guides (2019 to 2021), the Arch VFIO, Ubuntu VFIO or Pop!_OS VFIO guide. But I seem to recall he used a TR 2nd gen, but I could be wrong.

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The only hiccup I encountered in using virt-manager for me was libvirt daemon not running by default on most distributions. Means when you start virt-manager, it can’t connect.

systemctl start libvirtd

and

systemctl enable libvirtd

And I find virt-manager to have a very user-friendly GUI while still offering XML tab to get into the details if you really need it.
I made 7-8 different VMs (+some clones) yesterday to test out different OS and simulate some stuff.

Got all my ZVOLs in one directory and you can define a custom storage pool, resulting in just point&click of zvols and go right to boot. And virt-manager automatically ejects ISO file from the CD-ROM device after first boot, very convenient.

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Thanks for the warm welcome, and everyone for the replies. I’m too intimidated by VFIO haha, but I appreciate you sharing those guides. It’s good to see what’s possible. Looks like I just need to jump in with virt-manager and see how it goes!

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5

Yeah, just run it. It’s not rocket science. You can’t do anything wrong there. Start easy with a single disk (25-32GB) and any ISO and you’re good to go. I used virt-manager a lot when I switched to Linux a year ago. Always good to have some sandbox that can be reset and reinstalled at any time without messing up your real system. Or checking out other distros and window managers. Or dry running TrueNAS,unRAID or Proxmox and giving it 5 virtual disks so you can test around with some NAS setup

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