virsh

Virsh is a command-line interface for managing virtual machines through the libvirt virtualization API. It provides a text-based control interface to the libvirtd daemon, enabling management of hypervisors such as KVM, QEMU, Xen, and LXC. Virsh can connect to local or remote hosts using libvirt URIs, for example qemu:///system for system-wide VMs or qemu:///session for user sessions.

Core capabilities include listing domains, starting and stopping VMs, defining, undefining, and editing domain definitions, and managing related resources such as storage pools and networks. It operates with XML domain definitions; users can define a VM with virsh define path.xml, start it with virsh start domain, and remove it with virsh undefine domain. It can also create VMs from XML, edit running configurations with virsh edit, and display domain information with virsh dominfo.

Virsh supports a full VM lifecycle and administrative tasks, including shutdown, reboot, suspend, resume, and forceful destruction. It offers migration between hosts, and comprehensive snapshot management (snapshot-create-as, snapshot-list, snapshot-revert). Console access is available via virsh console, and devices can be attached or detached. It also provides commands for managing storage pools, volumes, and networks.

Connection and security aspects include authentication and support for remote connections over TLS. Connections can use various URIs such as qemu+ssh://, qemu+tcp://, or tls+tcp, depending on the setup. Virsh is widely used in conjunction with graphical tools like virt-manager and is a core component of many Linux virtualization environments. It is maintained as part of the libvirt project and released under its open-source license.