virt-qemu-run - Man Page

Run a standalone QEMU guest

Examples (TL;DR)

Run a QEMU virtual machine: virt-qemu-run path/to/guest.xml
Run a QEMU virtual machine and store the state in a specific directory: virt-qemu-run --root=path/to/directory path/to/guest.xml
Run a QEMU virtual machine and display verbose information about the startup: virt-qemu-run --verbose path/to/guest.xml
Display help: virt-qemu-run --help

Synopsis

virt-qemu-run [OPTION]... GUEST-XML-FILE

This tool provides a way to run a standalone QEMU guest such that it is completely independent of libvirtd. It makes use of the embedded QEMU driver support to run the VM placing files under an isolated directory tree. When the guest is run with this tool it is invisible to libvirtd and thus also invisible to other libvirt tools such as virsh.

The virt-qemu-run program will run the QEMU virtual machine, and then block until the guest OS shuts down, at which point it will exit.

If the virt-qemu-run program is interrupted (eg Ctrl-C) it will immediately terminate the virtual machine without giving the guest OS any opportunity to gracefully shutdown.

NOTE: this tool is currently considered experimental. Its usage and behaviour is still subject to change in future libvirt releases. For further information on its usage consult the QEMU driver documentation.

Options

GUEST-XML-FILE

The full path to the XML file describing the guest virtual machine to be booted.

-r DIR, --root=DIR: Specify the root directory to use for storing state associated with the virtual machine. The caller is responsible for deleting this directory when it is no longer required.

If this parameter is omitted, then a random temporary directory will be created, and its contents be automatically deleted at VM shutdown.

-s SECRET-XML-FILE,SECRET-VALUE-FILE, --secret=SECRET-XML-FILE,SECRET-VALUE-FILE: Specify a secret to be loaded into the secret driver. SECRET-XML-FILE is a path to the XML description of the secret, whose UUID should match a secret referenced in the guest domain XML. SECRET-VALUE-FILE is a path containing the raw value of the secret.
-v, --verbose: Display verbose information about startup.
-h, --help: Display the command line help.