Introduction

virt-up is a command line tool for creating virtual machines quickly on a libvirt based hypervisor. virt-up supports qemu/KVM and XEN virtualization.

virt-up runs the libquestfs tool virt-builder download (and cache) digitally signed virtual machine images. A base virtual machine is created from the downloaded image and is customized with virt-sysprep. Virtual machines are then cloned from the base virtual machine to quickly create new virtual machines.

virt-up automatically creates a login user and the ssh keys to connect to the new virtual machines. The login user is given sudo access. Connection information is stored in a json meta data file for each virtual machine created.

An ansible inventory file is created for the virtual machines to make it easier to run ansible playbooks for further configuration.

By default, virt_up will create image files in the default libvirt storage pool, e.g., /var/lib/libvirt/images. See the pool option Settings to change this. Be sure you have read and write access to the configured libvirt storage pool.

Normally, you want to run virt_up as a regular user, not root.