Linux virtual machines manager.
Name
virsh - management user interface
Synopsis
virsh [ OPTION ]... [ COMMAND_STRING ]
virsh [ OPTION ]... COMMAND [ ARG ]...
Description
The virsh program is the main interface for managing virsh guest domains. The program can be used to create, pause, and shutdown domains. It can also be used to list current domains. Libvirt is a C toolkit to interact with the virtualization capabilities of recent versions of Linux (and other OSes). It is free software available under the GNU Lesser General Public License. Virtualization of the Linux Operating System means the ability to run multiple instances of Operating Systems concurrently on a single hardware system where the basic resources are driven by a Linux instance. The library aims at providing a long term stable C API . It currently supports Xen, QEmu, KVM , LXC , OpenVZ, VirtualBox and VMware ESX .
The basic structure of most virsh usage is:
virsh [OPTION]... <command> <domain> [ARG]...
Where command is one of the commands listed below; domain is the numeric domain id, or the domain name, or the domain UUID ; and ARGS are command specific options. There are a few exceptions to this rule in the cases where the command in question acts on all domains, the entire machine, or directly on the xen hypervisor. Those exceptions will be clear for each of those commands. Note: it is permissible to give numeric names to domains, however, doing so will result in a domain that can only be identified by domain id. In other words, if a numeric value is supplied it will be interpreted as a domain id, not as a name. The virsh program can be used either to run one COMMAND by giving the command and its arguments on the shell command line, or a COMMAND_STRING which is a single shell argument consisting of multiple COMMAND actions and their arguments joined with whitespace, and separated by semicolons between commands. Within COMMAND_STRING , virsh understands the same single, double, and backslash escapes as the shell, although you must add another layer of shell escaping in creating the single shell argument. If no command is given in the command line, virsh will then start a minimal interpreter waiting for your commands, and the quit command will then exit the program.
The virsh program understands the following OPTIONS .
-h, --help
Ignore all other arguments, and behave as if the help command were given instead.
-v, --version[=short]
Ignore all other arguments, and prints the version of the libvirt library virsh is coming from
-V, --version=long
Ignore all other arguments, and prints the version of the libvirt library virsh is coming from and which options and driver are compiled in.
-c, --connect URI
Connect to the specified URI , as if by the connect command, instead of the default connection.
-d, --debug LEVEL
Enable debug messages at integer LEVEL and above. LEVEL can range from 0 to 4 (default). See the documentation of VIRSH_DEBUG environment variable below for the description of each LEVEL .
-l, --log FILE
Output logging details to FILE .
-q, --quiet
Avoid extra informational messages.
-r, --readonly
Make the initial connection read-only, as if by the --readonly option of the connect command.
-t, --timing
Output elapsed time information for each command.
-e, --escape string
Set alternative escape sequence for console command. By default, telnet's ^] is used. Allowed characters when using hat notation are: alphabetic character, @, [, ], \, ^, _.
