Remote management on KVM with SSH

When we set up virtual machines with libvirt/KVM on production environments, it is typical that the operating system where we want to create the virtual machines, it does not have a graphical user interface as Gnome or KDE, where we can run the Virtual Machine Manager in order to make or handle them.

For this reason, it is necessary to connect it remotely through Virtual Machine Manager so as to set up new virtual machines where a graphical wizard is required.

In this article, we are going to establish a connection over SSH from a Kubuntu 10.10 to a KVM hypervisor located on an Ubuntu Server 10.10. In this way, the libvirt management connection will be securely tunneled over an SSH connection.

In the following figure, you can see the needed packages which must be installed on each computer. Remember that I already presented a series of articles related to KVM virtualization (I, II, III and IV).




First of all, we must start the libvirtd daemon on the Ubuntu Server. We will also ensure that in successive starts, the daemon will run automatically.

javi@ubuntu-server:~$ sudo service libvirt-bin start

javi@ubuntu-server:~$ sudo update-rc.d libvirt-bin defaults

Then, we must generate a public key pair on the computer (kubuntu) where the Virtual Machine Manager (virt-manager package) will be used. In the next step, we have to copy the keys to the machine (ubuntu-server) where libvirtd will be running.

javi@kubuntu:~$ ssh-keygen -t rsa

javi@kubuntu:~$ ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub javi@ubuntu-server

In the previous output, we have copied the keys to the javi user home, where 'javi' is a simple user (no root) of ubuntu-server with rights to manage libvirt (by default, any user belonging to libvirtd group can handle libvirt).

And finally, we only have to to make a remote connection over SSH from the Virtual Machine Manager to the hypervisor located on the Ubuntu Server.