Manage KVM (QEMU) with Kimchi, a Virtual Machine Management Web interface

Install Kimchi on Ubunto in ten easy steps

Kimchi is an HTML5 based web interface for KVM. It provides easy and flexible interface to create and manage several guest virtual machines. Kimchi puts a thin layer over what is already there with KVM and Linux. You don’t need to install a separate management server as it manages KVM guests with the help of libvirt. It also supports mobile browsers.

Kimchi can be installed on the latest versions of Linux but we are explaining its installation on Ubuntu 14. Here, we used Ubuntu 14.10 as a KVM host

Step 1: First, run the command to install the following dependent packages before installing Kimchi.

 $ sudo apt-get install gcc make autoconf automake gettext git python-cherrypy3 python-cheetah python-libvirt libvirt-bin python-imaging python-pam python-m2crypto python-jsonschema qemu-kvm libtool python-psutil python-ethtool sosreport python-ipaddr python-ldap python-lxml nfs-common open-iscsi lvm2 xsltproc python-parted nginx firewalld python-guestfs libguestfs-tools python-requests websockify novnc spice-html5 wget

Step 2: Once the above packages are installed, download the latest version of Kimchi from github.

 $ wget https://github.com/kimchi-project/kimchi/archive/master.zip

Step 3: Unzip the downloaded file using the following command:

 $ unzip master.zip
 $ cd kimchi-master/

Step 4: Build Kimchi using the following command:

 $ ./autogen.sh --system

Step 5: Install Kimchi using the following command:

 $ make
 $ sudo make install # Optional if running from the source tree

Step 6: Run Kimchi by using the following command:

 $ sudo kimchid --host=0.0.0.0

Step 7: For accessing kimchi, open your web browser and type https://localhost:8001. You would be asked

to login. Use your system credentials to login your system.

Step 8: Once you logged in, you will see the guest virtual machines on current host (if there is some already running). On the Dashboard, you have buttons to perform shutdown, restart and connect to console by clicking on the desired action. If there is no virtual machine, then you can create a new guest machine by clicking on the + sign in the right corner. If you use this option to create a machine, it will be done through templates.

Step 9: You can manage templates through the templates menu. To create a new template, click on the + sign in the right corner. You can create a template using ISO images. You can place iso images on /var/lib/kimchi/isos or use a remote one.

Step 10: You can manage storage pool by going to the storage menu. There you can add a new storage by clicking on the + sign. It supports adding NFS, iSCSI and SCSI fibre channel storage. Network can be managed by going to the network menu. You can create a new network with isolated, NAT and bridged networking.