Learn how to enable Virsh Console Access for KVM Guests. Our KVM Support team is here to help you with your questions and concerns.

How to Enable Virsh Console Access For KVM Guests

Did you know that Virsh is a command-line tool that is part of the libvirt suite?

It offers management capabilities for different virtualization technologies like KVM.

When we enable Virsh console access it sets up a way to access the console of a virtual machine directly from the command line using the virsh tool.

This is useful for troubleshooting, configuring, and interacting with the VM’s console interface.

Let’s take a look at how to enable virsh console access for KVM guests:

1. First, we have to make sure that the libvirt package is installed on our system. We may also need a terminal emulator like virt-viewer.
2. Next, we must start the KVM guest we want to enable console access for using the virsh command or virt-manager.
3. Then, it is time to configure the VM to use a serial console. This is done by adding a serial console device to the VM’s configuration XML. We can do this manually by editing the XML or viag virsh edit:

   
<devices>
...
<serial type='pty'>
<target port='0'/>
</serial>
...
</devices>

    
4. Now, we have to add a redirection for the serial console to a suitable terminal type. This lets us connect to the VM’s console via virsh console:

   
<serial type='pty'>
<source path='/dev/pts/1'/>
<target port='0'/>
<alias name='ser


   Here, we have to replace /dev/pts/1 with the path to the terminal device on our system.
5. Finally, it is time to save the changes to the VM’s XML configuration and restart the VM to apply the changes:

   virsh define /path/to/vm.xml
virsh start vm-name
6. Now, we can use the virsh console command to connect to the VM’s console:

   virsh console vm-name

Enabling Virsh console access lets us interact with the VM’s console directly from the command line or a graphical console viewer. This helps us debug and troubleshoot situations where network-based access may not be available.

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Conclusion

Today, our Support Techs demonstrated how to enable Virsh Console Access.