libvirt and VirtualBox / Getting Started

I'm trying to get started on libvirt with VirtualBox as a virtualiz开发者_Python百科ation solution. I installed everything and VirtualBox itself is running when using their VBoxHeadless command. However, libvirt fails to connect to VirtualBox:

# virsh -c vbox:///session
libvir: error : could not connect to vbox:///session
error: failed to connect to the hypervisor

I could not find any hints in the libvirt documentation that point to whether I have to make any domain specific configuration before using virsh.

Does anyone have a hint? Or even better, maybe a tutorial that works through the way of using libvirt, virsh or it's APIs (my later goal) from the ground up.

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If you are doing this on Ubuntu, then the problem is their libvirt package is built without VirtualBox support.

You can rebuild the package with support very easily. Something like:

apt-get source -d libvirt
sudo apt-get build-dep libvirt
dpkg-source -x libvirt*dsc

Go into the libvirt directory and edit debian/rules so that instead of --without-vbox it says --with-vbox. You can add an entry to the top of debian/changelog so the package is compiled as a different version (e.g., append ~local1 to the version).

dpkg-buildpackage -us -uc -b -rfakeroot

You'll get new .debs built in the directory above. Use dpkg -i to install the relevant ones (libvirt0, libvirt0-bin, and whatever else you want).

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Double-check whether or not you have write access to /var/run/libvirt/libvirt-sock.

The socket file should have permissions similar to:

$ sudo ls -la /var/run/libvirt/libvirt-sock
srwxrwx--- 1 root libvirtd 0 2010-08-24 14:54 /var/run/libvirt/libvirt-sock

I think it could be helpful also to increase the libvirt logging capabilities by running this in your shell:

export LIBVIRT_DEBUG=1

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There is Ubuntu PPA for libvirt with VirtualBox support: https://launchpad.net/~cxl/+archive/ubuntu/libvirt