The internal workings of libvirt, QEMU, and KVM

The interaction of libvirt, QEMU, and KVM is something that gives us the full virtualization capabilities that are covered in this book. They are the most important pieces in the Linux virtualization puzzle, as each has a role to play. Let's describe what they do and how they interact with each other.

libvirt

When working with KVM, you're most likely to first interface with its main Application Programming Interface (API), called libvirt (https://libvirt.org). But libvirt has other functionalities – it's also a daemon and a management tool for different hypervisors, some of which we mentioned earlier. One of the most common tools used to interface with libvirt is called virt-manager (http://virt-manager.org), a Gnome-based graphical utility that you can use to manage various aspects of your local and remote hypervisors, if you so choose. libvirt's CLI utility is called virsh. Keep in mind that you can...