vms

This script is a simple tool that uses QEMU to create, run, and manage virtual machines.

It is a tool to simplify the management of multiple headless VMs without a graphical interface, using tools like ssh, sshfs, and rsync. The script uses minimal QEMU arguments to avoid excessive CPU usage. If you want to use Spice or other tools with QEMU, feel free to open a pull request to integrate that into the configuration.

Prerequisites

Ensure you have the following dependencies installed:

• qemu-img
• qemu-system-x86_64

Installation

Run:

$ make PREFIX=/home/USER/.local install  

Usage

The first time you run vms command, it will create a vms directory under your home directory to store the images, configs, and ISOs for the VMs.

First, download the ISO image, for example, arch linux.

The following command will create a new image in vms direcotry using qemu-img with the provided size, and create a config file.

$ vms create arch 50G 

Read/Modify the config file in: /home/USER/vms/arch.conf

Then you can boot from the ISO:

$ vms boot arch /home/USER/download/arch.iso

After installing, you can run this command whenever you want to run the VM:

$ vms run arch 

You can list all VMs by using this command:

$ vms list 

Configuration

By default, the script uses the following configurations for the virtual machines:

### Default vm configuration
# ram=12G
# cpu=host
# graphic=yes
# audio=no
#
# Forward host port 10022 to guest port 22 and host port 8080 to guest port 80
# ports=10022:22 8080:80
#
# display=sdl,grab-mod=rctrl
# vgadevices=VGA,vgamem_mb=64
# audiodevices=intel-hda hda-duplex
# devices=

display and vgadevices values are added to QEMU arguments only if the graphic are set to yes. Otherwise, the script will ignore them. By default, the graphics are set to yes for the installation. You may disable it in the config file after the installation.

These default settings can be customized by modifying config files.