Building new KVM instances with virt-install and using the console

In the Connecting to the running instance with VNC recipe from Chapter 1, Getting Started with QEMU and KVM, you learned how to connect to a QEMU/KVM virtual machine that was running a VNC server. This is a great way to connect to an instance that is being installed or in the process of booting in order to interact with it.

So far, we've used the custom raw image that we created earlier, which contains an installation of Debian. Recall from Chapter 1, Getting Started with QEMU and KVM, that we used the debootstrap command to install the OS inside the image file. In this recipe, we are going to use the virt-install tool to install a new Linux distribution, using the provided upstream Internet repository, as the source of the installation and then use the virsh command to attach to the running instance, using the console.

Getting ready

For this recipe, we are going to need the following:

• The virsh command
• The virt-install command...