Virt Manager hypervisor

# Virtual Machine

I never use a virtual machine and it was about time to!
As you may remember my plan is to learn network and cybersecurity so, as far as I understood, many task are performed in virtal enviroment.

They also are quite handy if you want to play with many different operating system at the same time and learn them whitout the need tu use double boot or have a completely dedicated hardware.

# Install Virt Manager

I decided to install Virt-Manager, it is a free and open source projects meant to run Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM) but as stated on their website, can manage Xen and LXC.

The following is what I did referring to the Arch Wiki:

• LC_ALL=C lscpu | grep Virtualization (to check KVM)
• sudo pacman -S qemu (to install qemu: machine emulator and virtualizer)
• sudo pacman -S libvirt (to install libvirt : graphical virtual machine manager)
• sudo pacman -S virt-manager (to install virt manager)
• sudo systemctl enable libvirtd
• sudo systemctl start libvirtd
• sudo usermod -G libvirt -a user (to add the user to the libvirtd group)

  Remember also to install the following if you had the problem described below:

• sudo pacman -S dnsmasq
• sudo systemctl enable dnsmasq
• sudo systemctl start dnsmasq

# Using Virt-Manager

I downloaded an .iso image Linux distro and open Virt-manager.
It’s a minimalist environment, select create a new virtual environment under the file menu, and follow the instruction. You will select the image iso, chose how much ram, cpu and storage to assign, rename and launch the application…and error.

Problem: “network default is not active”.

Since I had connection I went online and found out that many experience the same, we needed to installed also “ dnsmasq “. After doing so I was able to lunch my .iso image.

# Conclusion

Virt-manager seems a pretty good hypervisor, easy to use and to amend configurations for each machine even after create them.
I like the minimalist style and it is intuitive to use too.
Keep in mind that this is my first hypervisor so I can’t compare it to other.

On thing worth mentioning is that I only experience the issue of the missing package with Arch,

I installed it on Debian 12 and went fine without the need of dnsmasq.