virt-manager or Virtual Machine Manager is a frontend for managing virtual machines through libvirt. It primarily targets KVM virtual machines but is also capable of managing Xen and LXC. In this post we will focus on KVM.

All commands in this post are supposed to be run as root.

Installing necessary tools

We will install libvirt, QEMU and a spice client.

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apt-get --no-install-recommends install qemu-utils qemu-kvm virt-manager libvirt-clients libvirt-daemon-system virtinst bridge-utils gir1.2-spiceclientglib-2.0 gir1.2-spiceclientgtk-3.0 virt-viewer libosinfo-bin

Setting up libvirt

Set up networking

libvirt ships with a default network profile. Here we enable it have it start automatically. This will allow the virtual machines to connect to the internet.

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virsh net-start default
virsh net-autostart default

Add yourself to necessary groups

Here you will add yourself to the necessary groups to avoid running as root every time you want to run a virtual machine. Replace <user> with normal user.

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adduser <user> libvirt
adduser <user> libvirt-qemu
adduser <user> kvm

Enable and start libvirt

Apt automatically enables and starts libvirtd.service. We do it again anyways.

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systemctl enable libvirtd.service
systemctl restart libvirtd.service

Now you should be able to install and manage virtual machines through virt-manager.