[libvirt-users] virt-manager and the alternatives

[Laine Stump]

On 05/05/2016 03:58 PM, Narahari Lakshminarayana wrote:
> Friends:
>
> I am new to this and don't flame me yet.  Here is what I am facing.
>
> I installed libvirt stuff and then I run virt-manager to create a vm.
>
> When I run the virt-manager I am seeing issue
> Namespace GtkVnc not available for version 2.0
>
> How do I interact with the console screen so I can hit Enter key and do
> <ALT + F2> etc., ?

The display client in virt-manager has a "Send Key" menu that will send 
alt+Fn for you.

>
> Is virt-manager my only choice ?
>
> How to use VNC to connect to the virt-manager screen, not the VM's 
> console ?

Are you saying that you want virt-manager's window (with the list of 
virtual machines, etc) to be displayed on a different machine?

You could do that by installing virt-manager (and the client side of 
libvirt) on the machine with the display, then running virt-manager and 
telling it to add a new connection to a remote host (that is an option 
in the New Connection dialog).

Or you could do that by setting up X11 forwarding over ssh from the 
machine with the display (D) to the machine with KVM + libvirt + 
virt-manager (K). To forward X11, first login to K and make sure that 
/etc/ssh/sshd_config has the line "X11Forwarding yes" (you'll need to 
restart the sshd service if you change this), then from D run "ssh -X K" 
and run virt-manager at the shell prompt. It will be running on K but 
displayed on D. If you do this there will probably be authentication 
problems because it won't be able to find polkit; the way that I found 
of solving this was to create a new connection in virt-manager once it's 
open, telling it to connect to the "remote" host at address 127.0.0.1 
(pay attention to what it asks for when authenticating - if you've never 
ssh'ed to localhost on that machine before, it may be asking you to type 
"yes" or "no" rather than asking for the password!).

>
> =============
>
> Can I create VM with virsh and then set vnc for that and connect to 
> that with VNC ?

You could do that, once you know the address/port that qemu's vnc is 
listening on. Or you could use virt-viewer, which queries libvirt for 
the info, based on the name of the guest.

To learn the address and port of the guest's VNC (or spice!) server, use 
"virsh domdisplay $guestname". It will give you a URI with all the 
necessary info, e.g.:

     spice://127.0.0.1:5908

(This guest is using spice for the display rather than VNC, and is 
listening on localhost port 5908).