Virt-Manager & Co: Updated Virtualization Helpers

Aug 30, 2007

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 Python program with its GTK+ front-end draws on the functionality of the LGPL virtualization library, Libvirt. Development has focused on para-virtualization with Xen, however, guest systems on KVM and QEmu are also supported.

The new version is the first with the ability to manage remote virtual machines. To allow this to happen, the manager either relies on SSH Public Key Authentication, or TLS with X509 certificates. Virtual Machine Viewer, which is used for VNC connections to guest systems with graphical interfaces, has the same abilities. The program is still alpha with 0.0.2 being the current version, and is from the same Red Hat software development foundry.

At the same time, version 0.300.0 of the Virt-install command line program for installing guest systems on Xen was released. It also includes the Virt-image tool which creates guest system images based on templates.

All of these programs are available on the Virt-Manager homepage and released under GPLv2 a tar-gz archives, which you can download here.

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