Libvirt

Management tool

libvirt

Developer(s)	Red Hat
Initial release	December 19, 2005; 18 years ago (2005-12-19)^[1]

Stable release	10.0.0 / 15 January 2024; 2 months ago (2024-01-15)^[2]

Repository	gitlab.com/libvirt/libvirt
Written in	C
Operating system	Linux, FreeBSD, Windows, macOS^[3]
Type	Library
License	GNU Lesser General Public License
Website	libvirt.org

libvirt is an open-source API, daemon and management tool for managing platform virtualization.^[3] It can be used to manage KVM, Xen, VMware ESXi, QEMU and other virtualization technologies. These APIs are widely used in the orchestration layer of hypervisors in the development of a cloud-based solution.

Internals

libvirt is a C library with bindings in other languages, notably in Python,^[4] Perl,^[5] OCaml,^[6] Ruby,^[7] Java,^[8] JavaScript (via Node.js)^[9] and PHP.^[10] libvirt for these programming languages is composed of wrappers around another class/package called libvirtmod. libvirtmod's implementation is closely associated with its counterpart in C/C++ in syntax and functionality.

Supported Hypervisors

LXC – lightweight Linux container system
OpenVZ – lightweight Linux container system
Kernel-based Virtual Machine/QEMU (KVM) – open-source hypervisor for Linux and SmartOS^[11]
Xen – bare-metal hypervisor
User-mode Linux (UML) – paravirtualized kernel
VirtualBox – hypervisor by Oracle (formerly by Sun) for Windows, Linux, macOS, and Solaris
VMware ESXi and GSX – hypervisors for Intel hardware
VMware Workstation and Player – hypervisors for Windows and Linux
Hyper-V – hypervisor for Windows by Microsoft
PowerVM – hypervisor by IBM for AIX, Linux and IBM i
Bhyve – hypervisor for FreeBSD 10+^[12] (support added with libvirt 1.2.2)

User Interfaces

Various virtualization programs and platforms use libvirt. Virtual Machine Manager, GNOME Boxes and others provide graphical interfaces. The most popular command line interface is virsh, and higher level tools such as oVirt.^[13]

Corporate

Development of libvirt is backed by Red Hat,^[14] with significant contributions by other organisations and individuals. libvirt is available on most Linux distributions; remote servers are also accessible from Apple Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows clients.^[15]