Developer(s) Red Hat | Written in C | |
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Initial release December 19, 2005; 11 years ago (2005-12-19) Stable release 2.5.0 / 4 December 2016; 3 months ago (2016-12-04) Preview release 2.5.0-rc2 / December 1, 2016; 3 months ago (2016-12-01) Repository libvirt.org/git/?p=libvirt.git%3Ba%3Dsummary | ||
libvirt is an open source API, daemon and management tool for managing platform virtualization. It can be used to manage KVM, Xen, VMware ESX, QEMU and other virtualization technologies. These APIs are widely used in the orchestration layer of hypervisors in the development of a cloud-based solution.
Contents
Internals
libvirt itself is a C library, but it has bindings in other languages, notably in Python, Perl, OCaml, Ruby, Java, JavaScript (via Node.js) and PHP. libvirt for these programming languages is composed of wrappers around another class/package called libvirtmod. libvirtmod's implementation is closely associated with its counterpart in C/C++ in syntax and functionality.
Supported Hypervisors
User Interfaces
Libvirt is used by various virtualization programs and platforms. Graphical Interfaces are provided by Virtual Machine Manager and others. The most popular command line interface is 'virsh', and higher level tools like oVirt.
GNOME Boxes uses libvirt.
Corporate
Development of libvirt is backed by Red Hat, with significant contributions by other organisations and individuals. Libvirt is available on most Linux distributions; remote servers are also accessible from Apple Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows clients.