Tag: kvm

[WSL2/Win10] virt-manager for kvm on Windows

kvm Virtualisiation is great, however, useable tools to create and manage said VMs are rare. The best tool for the job, virt-manager is only available for Linux machines. But what if you want to manage said VMs also via Windows 10? WSL2 to the rescue: Just install WSL2 as shown by the excellent Microsoft Guide, install i.e. a Debian/GNU Linux instance and then launch into it.

You should update the instance to the latest version first:

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y && sudo apt dist-upgrade -y

then you can install virt-manager

sudo apt install -y virt-manager ssh-askpass

the last thing you would need is to install an X server on your windows machine, i.e. Xming or MobaXterm (which contains Xming) and launch it. Then you need to setup the X forwarding in your WSL2 instance, by entering

export DISPLAY="grep nameserver /etc/resolv.conf | sed 's/nameserver //':0"
export DISPLAY="sed -n 's/nameserver //p' /etc/resolv.conf:0"
export DISPLAY=$(ip route|awk '/^default/{print $3}'):0.0

after that, you can launch virt-manager by entering

virt-manager

and configure it to connect to your KVM instance via SSH.

Ubuntu 20.04 Update bricked KVM Virt

I updated an older Ubuntu 18.04 LTS system to the latest LTS and had (among other things) Docker and KVM installed. KVM is actually quite nice if you "just need" a small VM (pfsense ;)). I actually prefer Proxmox and ESXi, but hey, the right tool for the right job.

After the upgrade to 20.04, kvm did not work anymore and I got a lot of lvm2 errors during apt update / apt upgrade sessions, so a short google later I found this. I was a bit nervous, but the fix did neither hurt my kvm nor my Docker instances

sudo apt purge lvm2 && sudo apt install lvm2

(The fix is deleting and reinstalling lvm2)

After reinstalling lvm2, I could successfully execute a virsh list and got my list of running KVM machines back:

 Id   Name      State
-------------------------
 1    pfsense   running