Setting up a virtual machine server

With all the discussion out of the way, let’s start the process and set up our virtualization server. Even though KVM is built into the Linux kernel, we’ll still need to install some packages in order to properly interface with it. Specifically, we’ll need to install several libvirt packages, as well as QEMU itself. libvirt itself gives us access to manage virtualization platforms on our server, as it provides us with a set of useful tools to manage our virtual machines.

These packages will require a decent number of dependencies, so it may take a few minutes for everything to install:

sudo apt install bridge-utils libvirt-clients libvirt-daemon-system qemu-system-x86

You’ll now have an additional service running on your server, libvirtd. Once you’ve finished installing KVM’s packages, this service will be started and enabled for you. Feel free to take a look at it to see for yourself:

systemctl...