KVM, libvirt, polkit-1 and remote management

2013-07-16 22:00:00

With Red Hat's default virtualization software KVM, it's possible to remotely manage the virtual machines running on a system. See here for some regular 'virt-ception'.

Out of the box, libvirt will NOT allow remote management of its VMs. If you would like to run a virt-manager connection through SSH, you will need to play around with Polkit-1. There is decent documentation available for the configuration of libvirt and Polkit-1, but I thought I'd provide the briefest of summaries.

Go into /etc/polkit-1/localauthority/50-local.d and create a file called (for example) 10.libvirt-remote.pkla. This file should contain the following entries:

[libvirt Remote Management Access]
Identity=unix-group:libvirt
Action=org.libvirt.unix.manage
ResultAny=yes
ResultInactive=yes
ResultActive=yes

This setup will allow anyone with (secondary) group "libvirt" to manage VMs remotely. That's a nice option to put into your standard build!


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