KVM - Open Source Management of Virtual Machines

Hi there,

Recently got into virtualization with a new workstation that has a lot of cores, like, a lot a lot.

I was wondering, as virtualization with KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine)/Virtual Machine Manager has been a breeze so far on a standard Ubuntu install, what’s the best open source method/free method for managing multiple VMs - ie. you want to setup a server of VMs that people can work from, either total virtual desktops (maybe linux through thin clients?), or perhaps just docker containers/compute resources.

I found this list on the linux-kvm org website (page/Management_Tools)

But, I was hoping you could share some light on what would be a good one to try out.

Is there anything open source that is any good to manage this? Or is vmWare the only real option?

While not strictly open-source, is unRAID a potential option?

What are your thoughts?

Thanks!

Take a look at cockpit.

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Take a look at Proxmox. It’s based on Debian and KVM so should be pretty familiar if you’re comfortable with Ubuntu. Otherwise, Cockpit which was mentioned could work. Depending on the number of VMs you’re talking about, managing them by hand with libvirt tools may not be all that bad, either.

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If you are going to be using docker, then docker-compose the the command line tool to look into. If you want a GUI, then portainer is a web GUI.

For KVM virtual machines, probably the best command line management tool is libvirt.
For GUIs, Virt-manager is a decent option for a traditional GUI, it is maybe not the best for a large deployment, but for a handful of machines it is fine. It can connect to both the local KVM instance, along with connecting to remote machines.
Then there are a bunch of options for web GUIs, although I don’t have enough experience with them to recommend one.

Sadly virt-manager is deprecated … haven’t heard if anyone is forking it, to continue development / support.

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Maybe by RedHat support, but not by the community.

There were commits merged two hours ago. I don’t call that deprecated.

I mean, if you are a paying RedHat customer that only wants to use supported tools, then yes it is deprecated. But that is the only case IMO that it is is, otherwise it is just community supported like most other linux tools.

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I’ll second cockpit; although it doesn’t have any system for alerting you on issues which is unfortunate. I think there is an issue out there for adding something in like that but they said it’s a long ways out as it requires rearchitecting parts of it.

Otherwise I really, really like cockpit.

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To add, here’s the statement from the primary developer of virt-manager confirming.

https://blog.wikichoon.com/2020/06/virt-manager-deprecated-in-rhel.html

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This is good news. Hopefully IBM doesn’t decide to “change course”.

Ok, so after having a look around.

Cockpit, looks good if you’ve already got a server up and running? If I’m not mistaken? It doesn’t actually handle spinning up VMs, on-the-fly right?

Which leaves:

Proxmox as an option (I found that last night) looks very good!

or

Ovirt. But ovirt looks like you have to use Redhat/Centos, as the OS, which is kind of a bummer, since it’s less noob friendly than Ubuntu.

Anyway, thanks for everyone’s thoughts!

You can create libvirt and docker containers from Cockpit. For libvirt machines, there’s not a ton of options. You won’t be doing VFIO through the gui for example.