Virtup was initially developed to become a partial Vagrant replacement for KVM.
Virtup provides simple command line interface to operate with virtual machines. It can easily import virtual machine from image into hypervisor, start it and provide you with it's ip address to connect via SSH or other preferred method.
Python 2.7
libvirt Python API bindings
To deploy virtual machines on local host, you should install
libvirtd and requirements. Also ensure that your host is KVM capable.
If you would like to use external host as hypervisor, then install only requirements.
You can have running guest in six steps.
1. Install requirements
Ubuntu/Debian
sudo apt-get install libvirt-bin python-libvirt
CentOS/Fedora
sudo yum install qemu-kvm libvirt libvirt-python
2. Download one of prebuild boxes. You can download them from here
wget -O debian.xz http://goo.gl/queYqC
3. Unpack it
unxz debian.xz
4. Import it with preferred name, optionally memory, cpu, net and storage pool can be specified
./virtup.py import -i debian-6-amd64.img debian
Uploading template into volume debian
done 100.00%
Temporary template written in /tmp/debian.xml
debian created, you can start it now
5. Start it
./virtup.py up debian
debian started
6. Open console of virtual machine.
Also template used in example has passswordless ssh root login.
./virtup.py console debian
Create virtual machine with create command or with virsh.
Install operating system on it, booting it from iso, pxe or your preferred method.
Start it, install necessary soft. Configure ssh.
Remove /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules file.
This is required for network interface name to be eth0 on first boot of newly created machine.
To enable console access please follow this manual.
Shut it down and use it's disk image as template.