- Virt-manager-3.1.0-1.fc33.noarch.rpm: Desktop tool for managing virtual machines via libvirt: Fedora Updates aarch64 Official: virt-manager-3.2.0-2.fc33.noarch.rpm: Desktop tool for managing virtual machines via libvirt: Fedora Updates x8664 Official: virt-manager-3.2.0-2.fc33.noarch.rpm: Desktop tool for managing virtual machines via libvirt.
- Virt-manager, also known as Virtual Machine Manager, is a graphical tool for creating and managing guest virtual machines. Creating a guest virtual machine with virt-manager.
The source for the Windows drivers is hosted in a repository on GIT hub. Anonymous users can clone the repository
You can then open virt-manager. To create a new virtual machine, you can go to File → New virtual machine or just click on the New button below the File menu entry, like so. The New VM window will appear. In my case, since my Debian “host” system was running as a VM, virt-manager was letting me know KVM was not available for me. Virt-manager 0.1.3; virt-manager 0.1.2; Binaries. In addition there is are YUM repositories containing RPMs built for i686 and x8664 hosts. These YUM repositories are only a temporary provision until the application is approved for inclusion in Fedora Extras. Windows VirtIO Drivers. The source for the Windows drivers is hosted in a repository on GIT hub. Anonymous users can clone the repository git clone git://github.com.
git clone git://github.com/virtio-win/kvm-guest-drivers-windows.git
Binary Drivers
Binary drivers are provided by some Linux distributions including WHQL Certified drivers.
For example the binary drivers for Ubuntu can be found here.
64-bit versions of Windows Vista and newer (this currently includes Windows Server 2008, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows Server 2012) require the drivers to be digitally signed to load.
If your distribution does not provide binary drivers for Windows, you can use the package from the Fedora Project. These drivers are digitally signed, and will work on 64-bit versions of Windows:
- Drivers should be signed for Windows 64bit platforms.
- Here are some links how to self sign and install self signed drivers:
I generally describe virt-manager as 'simple'—and in many ways it's much simpler than Boxes is—but there are different ways to interpret simplicity.
The integrated approach
Under the hood, Boxes shares the majority of its technical underpinnings with virt-manager: the libvirt virtualization API, the Linux Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor, and the qemu generic processor emulator. Virt-manager exposes those inner workings as much as possible while trying not to get them unnecessarily in the way.
Boxes approaches the same problem from the opposite direction—it abstracts away as much as possible, with no apologies for doing so.
Boxes [...] is targeted towards a typical desktop end-user who wants either a very safe and easy way to try out new operating systems or new (potentially unstable) versions of her/his favorite operating system(s), or needs to connect to a remote machine (home-office connection being a typical use-case). For this reason, Boxes does not provide many of the advanced options to tweak virtual machines provided by virt-manager. Instead, Boxes focuses on getting things working out of the box with very little input from user.
This desktop-focused approach may begin with trimming away advanced options, but it doesn't end there—Boxes offers quite a few usability tweaks that virt-manager doesn't, and likely won't. This effort at greater integration begins before a new virtual machine is even running. Most popular—and even not-so-popular—guest operating systems are available in Boxes as a built-in download direct from the source. Instead of needing to google 'OpenBSD' to find a download link, a Boxes user can just start typing 'open' into a search field and immediately see a list of OpenSUSE and OpenBSD versions.
The extra integration is most evident when running Linux guests (virtual machines), where virtio drivers are always available and libvirt integration is at a maximum. When we tested an Ubuntu Focal Fossa guest, the guest's video resolution changed dynamically and automatically as we resized its window on the host operating system—and files dragged from the host's file explorer onto the Boxes window were automatically transferred into the guest, where they showed up in the logged-in user's Downloads folder.
Easy mode isn't necessarily easier
Virt-manager Suspend Guest On Reboot
Although I led with a good experience above, the Ubuntu Focal guest wasn't actually the first thing I tried. Boxes specifically aims to give inexperienced users 'a very safe and easy way to try out new operating systems'—so that's just what I did, shooting for the moon with an OpenBSD install attempt on my first try.
AdvertisementSearching for OpenBSD under the Create VM dialog went extremely well—as I typed 'open' into the search box, it dynamically populated the list of known distros with matching results. I skipped down past OpenSUSE and went directly to OpenBSD, which I'd never run before. This seemed to go well at first—it downloaded the ISO quickly, and jumped right into an installation—but the installation itself had severe problems, and I never got a working guest out of it.
OpenBSD's installer is quite primitive and couldn't cope with some of the choices Boxes had made for its environment. It couldn't successfully find its own files on the virtual CD it had booted from, it didn't quite understand the network stack (interpreting its IP address as static rather than DHCP), and it had incredibly bad keybounce. (If you had to click that link to figure out what keybounce is, I don't blame you.)
By contrast, OpenBSD installed without a hitch under virt-manager. Although I did need to download an OpenBSD 6.6 ISO manually and point virt-manager to it—and select the number of vCPUs as well as how much RAM and disk space to allocate—the actual install there went flawlessly. In less than five minutes total, virt-manager delivered a working OpenBSD guest without so much as a hiccup.
Brittle installation environment aside, Boxes will probably frustrate fellow KVM veterans immensely. Boxes guests need extra steps to be managed or inspected with the usual libvirt-related commands—you won't see a running Boxes guest under virt-top, virsh list, or similar tools by default.
If you want to manage Boxes guests with standad tools, you must connect separately to qemu:///session (which runs under the logged-in user context) instead of qemu:///system (which runs under the global system context—typically a dedicated user account like libvirt-qemu).
Be warned, simply displaying a VM in virt-manager doesn't keep Boxes from messing with it—for example, a few moments after I popped a virt-manager console window to my Focal guest, Boxes 'helpfully' paused the VM, since Boxes no longer had focus.
The papercuts continue
OpenBSD problems aside, Boxes was pretty painful even with better-supported guests. It automatically hibernated my Ubuntu Focal Fossa VM when I closed the main Boxes window—and when I tried to open Boxes again, the entire application timed out waiting for the Fossa guest to reboot. I had to click Boxes from the launcher a second time, several seconds later, before anything visible happened at all.
Presumably, the idea here is to make it less likely for a very inexperienced user to waste system resources on entirely idle VMs. There's a Run in backgroundoption in the VM's Properties dialog that should prevent the automatic hibernation—but that dialog is dangerous even to look at. The content of Properties is taller than the dialog itself, necessitating vertical scrolling.
Scrolling down the guest Properties dialog with the mouse-wheel works—until that scrolling places the Memory or Maximum Disk Size slider under your mouse cursor. At that point, the focus suddenly shifts—and you're suddenly resizing your guest's RAM or hard drive. Yikes.
A quick look at virt-manager
Virt-manager doesn't offer all the fancy download or desktop integration features Boxes does—but it's considerably more capable and reliable.
A virt-manager VM won't automatically hibernate itself when its console window is closed. It also won't resize its desktop resolution to fit the window, or automatically feed a dropped file into a magic download. Seen from a sysadmin's perspective, this lack is a feature, not a bug—it means that the guest is properly isolated, exposing it and the host to the minimum of weirdness (let alone security problems) from one another.
Virt-manager also offers nearly effortless administration of multiple physical VM hosts. The view you see in the gallery above gives you some idea—in addition to the two hosts running in my home network, sharp eyes can spot five more hosts with hostnames ending in .wg, which in my case means they're on the other side of a WireGuard tunnel.
A single virt-manager instance on a workstation can easily manage tens or even hundreds of separate hosts, connected by SSH tunnels using shared-key authentication. A double-click pops a graphical console window into the local or remote VM, using either Spice or VNC as the remote-control protocol.
In the toolbar of a virt-manager console window, a simple set of start, pause, and power icons do exactly that—another offers the ability to create and manage snapshots (which Boxes failed at), and the Info button gives access to inspect and modify the VM's virtual hardware and related settings.
Conclusions
Nvidia Qemu Virt-manager
I like the idea of Boxes, and I think there's a definite market for it. The allure of incredibly safe, simple, and easy distro-hopping isn't lost on me—and I particularly liked the integrated download mechanism.
Unfortunately, I don't think Boxes is ready for prime time yet. The number of sharp edges I encountered even with a very modern Linux guest OS running a Gnome3 desktop outweighed Boxes' simplicity—let alone the completely broken install environment for OpenBSD, as compared to a 'just works' experience on virt-manager.
The good
- Easy, dynamic search of available distros to install and play with
- Dynamic resolution changes to fit host window
- Simple drag-and-drop operations to get files from host to guest—if the desktop environment in the guest supports it
The bad
- Extreme lack of configurability
- Broken environments in distros that 'just work' on virt-manager
- Broken QEMU snapshot management
- Default allocation of all host CPU threads to the guest
- Lack of discoverability—where are the downloaded ISOs? Where are the guests' virtual drives?
The ugly
Virt-manager Download
- Focus-stealing, mouse-wheel resizing of the guest hard disk—what?!
- Apparently broken re-launching due to guest hibernation
- No visibility to standard libvirt tools like
virsh,virt-top, orvirt-manager - Buggy, odd ambiguation of normal remote control with guest management—trying to be too many things to too many people
- Easy mode needs to be easy, and at version 3.36 and counting, Boxes just isn't there yet.
Virt Manager Macos
Listing image by Jim Salter