I just installed KVM on a new system and just found out the hard way that virt-manager cannot be installed on the same machine because of a library conflict, so I will have to manage my VMs from another machine. I will use a SSH tunnel to forward the port, but I don't know what it is.

Also, how do I start KVM? I tried service kvm start but it does not find it. Guessing it's something else.

You didn't mention Distro, KVM or virt-manager versions, so I can only give info that I have learned from Fedora 10->14 and KVM.

On Fedora:
KVM/QEMU service name is libvirtd, so that's the name to use with service and chkconfig commands.

I have never had a problem using the current release versions of both virt-manager and KVM on the same system using the same Fedora repository for both packages, preventing library conflicts.

In virt-manager, selecting the connection method 'SSH' creates its own ssh connection to port 22, so you not need to create a separate ssh tunnel. Earlier versions of virt-manager, on Fedora, required that the root user from virt-manager system had already established a regular ssh session to the root user on the KVM machine to manually answer 'yes' to the acceptance of the RSA key, as the older virt-manager would often error out during that process.

Hope it helps

Using CentOS 5. I tried the option for SSH tunnel in virt-manager, but it does not even prompt me for a username or anything it just defaults as root. I don't want to ssh as root because that is a big security issue. I don't even turn that on. I also need to be able to specify a different port as I don't have ssh listening on port 22 due to all the bots out there. No matter how secure your password is, one will eventually get in.

I also can't find any references to libvirtd on my system. Is there anything else I need to install other then kvm? I just did yum install kvm.

Thanks in advance.

As far as I know, virt-manager will only work as root, the port number might be change-able from 22, although I don't where that change would be made.

Are these systems connected directly to the Internet, and if so, why? I don't use ssh at port 22 or allow remote root access on a system directly connected to the Internet either, but doing root to root ssh inside a firewalled, NAT'ed LAN is not terribly insecure. Bots should not be getting past a firewall.

Anyway, not sure about Centros, but on Fedora, these are the minimum packages required for a full virt-manager/KVM/QEMU system:
libvirt
libvirt-client
libvirt-python
python-virtinst
qemu
qemu-common
qemu-img
qemu-kvm
qemu-system-x86
qemu-user
virt-manager
virt-mem
virt-top
virt-viewer

Hi,

I want to learn about Nagios software, if anybody has proper documentation for nagios. Please let’s post it on request.

Thanks,

Deepan (Linux devotee)