Red Hat's Emerging Technologies working group has now released Virtual Machine Manager (Virt-manager) version 0.5.0, a desktop application that gives administrators the ability to manage virtual machines running on, say, Xen.
The days when administrators were forced to manage virtual machines at the console are gone. Competitors of VMware and Citrix now offer equally sophisticated GUIs. One promising alternative is Red Hat’s oVirt – a free Java interface for Libvirt.
To write low-level scripts, as an admin, you need to know whether you are currently on a physical or a virtual machine. Charly finds out with a couple of clever hacks.
KVM has many ways to map virtual disks on the host system. The appropriate choice of disk format has an effect not only on the speed of I/O operations but also on snapshots and backups.