Getting acquainted with libvirt and its implementation

As discussed in a previous chapter, there is an extra management layer called libvirt which can talk to various hypervisors (for example: KVM/QEMU, LXC, OpenVZ, UML, and so on) underlying it. libvirt is an open source Application Programming Interface (API). At the same time, it is a daemon and a management tool for managing different hypervisors as mentioned. libvirt is in use by various virtualization programs and platforms; for example, graphical user interfaces are provided by GNOME boxes and virt-manager (http://virt-manager.org/). Don't confuse this with virtual machine monitor/VMM which we discussed in Chapter 1, Understanding Linux Virtualization.

The command line client interface of libvirt is the binary called virsh. libvirt is also used by other higher-level management tools, such as oVirt (www.ovirt.org):

Most people think that libvirt is restricted to a single node or local node where it is running; it's not true...