virt-who - Man Page

Agent for reporting virtual guest IDs to an entitlement server.

Options

-h, --help: show this help message and exit
-d, --debug: Enable debugging output
-o, --one-shot: Send the list of guest IDs and exit immediately
-i INTERVAL, --interval=INTERVAL: Acquire and send guest information each N seconds; note that this option is recommendation only, requested interval might not been honoured and the actual interval might be longer or shorter depending on backend that is used.
-p, --print: Print the host/guests association in JSON format to standard output
-c, --config: Use configuration file directly (will override configuration from other files. 'global', 'default', and 'system_environment' sections are not read in files passed in via this option, and are only read from /etc/virt-who.conf). Can be used multiple times. See virt-who-config(5) for details about configuration file format.
-s, --status: Confirm the correctness of the configurations. Test the connections and build a report on the result. The default display is a short summary of the configurations.
-j, --json: Used with status to return a more detailed report in json format.

Usage

Mode

virt-who has four modes how it can run:

1. one-shot mode

# virt-who -o

In this mode virt-who just sends the host to guest association to the server once and then exits.

2. interval mode

# virt-who -i INTERVAL

This is the default mode. virt-who will listen to change events (if available) or do a polling with given interval, and will send the host to guest association when it changes. The default polling interval is 3600 seconds and can be changed using "-i INTERVAL" (in seconds).

3. print mode

# virt-who -p

This mode is similar to oneshot mode but the host to guest association is not send to server, but printed to standard output instead.

3. status mode

# virt-who -s

This mode is for configuration diagnosis. The host to guest association is not compiled and is not sent to the server. When executed, it will confirm the ability to log into and retrieve data from the source for each configuration. It will also confirm the credentials and organization for each destination in the configurations. It will produce results in two ways that can be used to diagnose problems. The first is a summary:

Configuration Name: esx_config1
Source Status: success
Destination Status: success

Configuration Name: hyperv-55
Source Status: failure
Destination Status: failure

The second is a machine-readable json output (which is generated when the -j/--json option is used):

{
"configurations": [
{
"name":"esx-conf1",
"source":{
"connection":"esx_system.example.com",
"status":"success",
"last_successful_retrieve":"2020-02-28 07:25:25 UTC",
"hypervisors":20,
"guests":37
},
"destination":{
"connection":"candlepin.example.com",
"status":"success",
"last_successful_send":"2020-02-28 07:25:27 UTC",
"last_successful_send_job_status":"FINISHED"
}
},
{
"name":"hyperv-55",
"source":{
"connection":"windows10-3.company.com",
"status":"failure",
"message":"Unable to connect to server: invalid credentials",
"last_successful_retrieve":"none"
},
"destination":{
"connection":"candlepin.company.com",
"status":"failure",
"message":"ConnectionRefusedError: [Errno 111] Connection refused",
"last_successful_send":"none",
"last_successful_send_job_status":"none"
}
}
] }

Logging

virt-who always writes error output to file /var/log/rhsm/rhsm.log. It also writes the same output to standard error output when started from command line.

virt-who can be started with option "-d" in all modes and with all backends. This option will enable verbose output with more information.

Security

Virt-who may present security concerns in some scenarios because it needs access to every hypervisor in the environment. To minimize security risk, virt-who is a network client, not a server. It only does outbound connections to find and register new hypervisors and does not need access to any virtual machines. To further reduce risk, deploy virt-who in a small virtual machine with a minimal installation and lock it down from any unsolicited inbound network connections.

Here is a list of ports that need to be open for different hypervisors:

VMWare ESX/vCenter: 443/tcp
Hyper-V: 5985/tcp
RHEV-M: 443/tcp or 8443/tcp (depending on version)
libvirt: depending on transport type, default (for remote connections) is qemu over ssh on port 22
local libvirt uses a local connection and doesn't need an open port
kubevirt: 8443/tcp
Nutanix AHV: 9440/tcp

virt-who also needs to have access to an entitlement server. Default port is 443/tcp. All the ports might be changed by system administrators.

Using the same network for machine running virt-who as for hypervisor management software instead of production VM networks is suggested.

Authors

Radek Novacek <rnovacek at redhat dot com>
William Poteat <wpoteat at redhat dot com>

Referenced By

virt-who-config(5).

April 2016

Synopsis