Stuck with ‘No guest machines present libvirtd’ error? We can help you.

Recently one of our customers came to us stating that the libvirt daemon is successfully started, but no guest virtual machines appear to be present.

Here a Bobcares we handle similar errors as a part of our Server Management Services.

Today, let’s see how our Support Techs troubleshoot this error and fix it for our customers.

How to troubleshoot and fix ‘No guest machines present libvirtd’

We can use the virsh command to check this.

# virsh list --all
Id Name State
----------------------------------------------------

Steps to Troubleshoot

There will be various possible causes of this problem. The following are some of the steps to find the cause of this:

1. Firstly, we can verify KVM kernel modules

2. After that we can verify that KVM kernel modules are inserted in the kernel:

We can use the following command for this:

# lsmod | grep kvm

In case if we are using an AMD machine we can use the following command to check this:

# lsmod | grep kvm_amd

If the modules are not present, insert them using the following command:

modprobe <modulename>

3. Next, we can verify whether the virtualization extensions are supported and enabled on the host using the following command:

# egrep "(vmx|svm)" /proc/cpuinfo
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc ... svm ... skinit wdt npt lbrv svm_lock nrip_save
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc ... svm ... skinit wdt npt lbrv svm_lock nrip_save

We need to enable virtualization extensions in hardware firmware configuration within the BIOS setup.

4. Finally verifying that the URI of the client is configured as intended.

We can do this with the following command:

# virsh uri
vbox:///system

For example, this message shows the URI is connected to the VirtualBox hypervisor, not QEMU, and reveals a configuration error for a URI that is otherwise set to connect to a QEMU hypervisor. If the URI was correctly connecting to QEMU, the same message would appear instead as:

# virsh uri qemu:///system

This situation occurs when there are other hypervisors present, which libvirt may speak to by default.

We can fix ‘No guest machines present libvirtd’  by doing the above steps.

Once we complete the above steps of troubleshooting, we can use the following command to view a list of guest virtual machines:

 [Need assistance? – We are available 24*7]

Conclusion

To conclude, we saw how our Support Engineers troubleshoot and fix No guest machines present libvirtd for our customers.