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<td width="20%">[[Creating an RHEL 5 KVM Virtual Machine|Previous]]<td align="center">[[RHEL 5 Essentials|Table of Contents]]<td width="20%" align="right">[[Managing and Monitoring RHEL 5 based KVM Guest Systems|Next]]</td>
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<td width="20%">Creating an RHEL 5 KVM Virtual Machine<td align="center"><td width="20%" align="right">Managing and Monitoring RHEL 5 based KVM Guest Systems</td>
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In the previous chapter we explored the creation of KVM guest operating systems on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 host using the virt-manager graphical tool. Whilst this graphical tool does much to ease the virtual machine creation process, there are some drawbacks to this approach. Perhaps the most significant shortcoming is that the graphical tool does not provide any way to automate creation of virtual machines. In addition, virt-manager can only be used where access to a graphical desktop environment is available. In the case of headless servers, however, this is not always the case.
In this chapter, therefore, we will turn our attention to the creation of KVM and Xen based virtual machines using the virt-install and virsh command-line tools. These tools provide all the capabilities of the virt-manager utility with the added advantage that they can be used within scripts to automate virtual machine creation. In addition, the virsh command allows virtual machines to be created based on a specification contained within a configuration file.
The virt-install tool is supplied to allow new virtual machines to be created by providing a list of command-line options. This chapter assumes that the necessary KVM or Xen tools are installed. For details on these requirements read [[Installing KVM Virtualization on RHEL 5]] or [[Installing and Configuring RHEL 5 Xen Virtualization]].
