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Luke has no name
Asked: 2010-08-11 06:13:13 +0800 CST

Access VMs via terminal during installation?

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I'm trying to install some Lucid VMs on a Lucid host using virt-install. After I create the image, I want to go through the guest installation without using a GUI, such as virt-manager or VNC.

Is there a way to access the installation screen via terminal?

ubuntu kvm-virtualization virt-install

3 Answers

  1. This isn't accessing the installation screen via the terminal, but it's possible to install the VM from the command line, using a script instead of the traditional graphical installation tool. Look into python-vm-builder. It's powerful, but won't support every option such as disk encryption. Installing in such a way will be far quicker, however - a matter of minutes rather than tens of minutes.

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  2. If you are familiar with vnc you can use a vnc client to connect to the console of the virtual machine. virsh vncdisplay $machinename will return a port such as :2 this is the VNC port so in a vnc client put $yourserversip:5900+the port so if it returns :2 and your server is 10.44.56.25 then the address would be 10.44.56.25:5902.

    By default vnc binds to localhost so you would need to use a ssh tunnel IE ssh 10.44.56.2 -L 5902:localhost:5902 then vnc to localhost:5902. You can modify this in the libvirt config.

    Hope this helps!

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  3. qemu/kvm supports ncurses console, but libvirt does not -- you will have to start kvm manually, not from virsh.

    alternately, you can use Google's SGABIOS instead of standard VGA BIOS.

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