vmtools

vmtools is a Qemu virtual machines manager which strives to be easy, versatile and modular while adhering to the principle of least privileges, to respect users' freedom and security.

It offers advanced features such as the ability to freely fork and merge virtual machines, is extensible through the use of plugins and templates, respects your security by not using any root daemon and is entirely developed using POSIX Shell.

Get it

vmtools is freely available (GPL v3).

Latest news on the project can be found on the project's main page.

Documentation

Guided tour

• Part 1 - introduction and basic usage: Install vmtools and use vmup to boot disk image files.
• Part 2 - manage virtual machines: Fork, merge, move, rename and delete virtual machines.

Man pages

The man pages cover regular usage of vmtools:

• Overview (vmtools(7)) provides a high level description of vmtool features, from its design to its customization.

• Configuration (vmtools.conf(5)) contains a reference guide on vmtools configuration.

• User commands:

  Command	Description
  vmcp	Copy or fork virtual machines.
  vmcreate	Create a new virtual machine.
  vmdown	Shutdown a virtual machine.
  vmfix	Detect and fix virtual machines issues.
  vmfork	Copy or fork virtual machines.
  vminfo	Report information on a virtual machine.
  vmmerge	Merge two related virtual machines.
  vmmon	Access the Qemu monitor shell of a virtual machine.
  vmmv	Move or rename a virtual machine home directory.
  vmps	Report information on running virtual machines.
  vmrm	Delete a virtual machine home directory.
  vmrndmac	Generate a random MAC address.
  vmup	Start virtual machine or a bootable file or media.

Other documentation sources

For developers and more advanced users:

• Several README.txt files provide more information on the project tree as well as guidance on plugins and templates development.

• As last resort, you can directly check the code. I documented in a way which, I hope, will make it easy for you to find the information you are looking for.

Upcoming features

Here are the main planned features:

• Rank 1:

  • Support of guests sleep mode, including starting sleeping guests in snapshot mode (ie. restore the same content to RAM on each start).
  • Add a command to easily insert/eject removable medias while a guest is running.

• Rank 2:

  • Develop templates and features (including floppy drives) to both support legacy guests and offer better performance for modern ones (disk I/O in particular may be easily improvable).

• Rank 3:

  • Implement auto-snapshoting: automatically keep the last n snapshots to allow easier guest rollback.

vmtools is currently in early development stage, in particular expect settings names and default values to change.

Report an issue

Please send bug reports to the vmtools issues page on GitHub.