vms

An example using vms for creating and managing a qemu virtual machine

You need to install vde2, tigervnc and qemu first

Get the ready made package and install it, you should use the latest release

wget https://bitbucket.org/yotis/vms/vms-0.2.1-noarch-1did.tgz
upgradepkg --install-new vms-0.2.1-noarch-1did.tgz

Or use slackbuilds.org, eg via sbopkg

sbopkg -i vms

Create the vm1 virtual machine and show the related configuration and files

vms create vm1
vms list
grep vm1 ~/.vms/vms.conf
ls ~/.vms/vm1

You can use the ~/.vms/vm1 directory to store anything you want, but this is not mandatory. The only thing that is needed is the ~/.vms/vm1/vm1.sh script.

To show the configuration of the vm1 virtual machine, use this

vms info vm1

You should be able to start vm1 now with

vms start vm1

To display the running status of vm1 use this

vms status vm1

If you want to kill vm1, you can do it like this

vms kill vm1

Now, add 2GB of memory

vms conf vm1 mem 2048

Let's create a 20G disk and attach it to vm1

cd ~/.vms/vm1
qemu-img create -f qcow2 disk0.img 20G
vms conf vm1 disk0 '~/.vms/vm1/disk0.img'

And now, let's add a cdrom and boot from it. If there is a slackware install dvd located in ~/os

vms conf vm1 bootcd ~/os/slackware64-14.2-install-dvd.iso
vms info vm1

Even though you can edit vm1's configuration via

vms conf

commands, you are encouraged to edit ~/.vms/vms.conf by hand. The format is very simple and since this file is sourced during vms execution you can be creative with bash variables. For example, you could configure shared storage for the os images by declaring a variable at the beginning of ~/.vms/vms.conf.

ISOS=/path/to/isos

Then you would use the ISOS variable via 'vms conf' like this

vms conf vm1 bootcd '"$ISOS/slackware64-14.2-install-dvd.iso"'

Notice the use of single and double quotes.

• Nikos Giotis