vms

A simple script to manage headless VMs

It is a tool to simplify the management of multiple headless VMs without a graphical interface, using tools like ssh, sshfs, and rsync. The script uses minimal QEMU arguments to avoid excessive CPU usage. If you want to use Spice or other tools with QEMU, feel free to open a pull request to integrate that into the script.

Prerequisites

Ensure you have the following commands installed:

• qemu-img
• qemu-system-x86_64

Installation

Run:

$ make PREFIX=/home/USER/.local install  

Usage

The first time you run vms command, it will create a vms directory under your home directory to store vm images and config files.

First, download the ISO image, for example, arch linux.

The following command will create a new image in the vms direcotry using qemu-img with the specified size and generate a config file.

$ vms create arch 50G -f qcow2 -o nocow=on 

Read/Modify the config file in: /home/USER/vms/arch/config

Then you can boot from the ISO file:

$ vms boot arch /home/USER/download/arch.iso

After installing, you can run this command whenever you want to start the VM:

$ vms start arch 

To stop the VM:

$ vms stop arch 

To list all VMs:

$ vms list 

Configuration

By default, the script applies the following configurations to each new VM.

### Default vm configuration
smp=22
devices=
ram=12G
image_format=raw
nic=user
daemonize=off
cpu=host
ports=10022:22 8080:80
machine=
serial=none
bios=/usr/share/qemu/bios.bin
boot=menu=on
audiodev=
monitor=stdio
display=sdl
accel=kvm

These default configurations can be customized by modifying the config files for each vm.