I am a newbie in the area of Linux KVM virtualization. Can anybody help how to connect to my KVM hypervisor from a remote Linux machine without using LibVirt or any other third party library. I have searched for this but all the results that i got was using libvirt or commands related to it. I am not allowed to use any third party library and need to take the backup of my KVM from remote machine.
Can you also tell me why a deamon is required in KVM when it is not required in VMware ESXI?
Are there any KVM API's present for taking the backup of VM's running on KVM from a remote machine (without using libvirt)? This backup need to be take at different levels such as VM level, Disk level and file level.
Best Answer
KVM is a hypervisor, not a management stack, so if you want to manage it you either log in to the host console, or use management tools like libvirt. Comparing it to ESXi is not very correct in this sense - ESXi is packed with daemons and additional tools, and this is exactly the functionality libvirt provides (actually, it provides more), so I can't see why you cannot use a common Linux based library that is designed to answer your every need on a single host setup.
KVM has the basic command line tools to start/stop VMs, and to interact with the VM you can connect to qemu monitor, however, all of this is much easier and intuitive with libvirt as well.
BTW, using libguestfs you can read the guest filesystem from the host, and take selective backups. And with libvirt managing VM snapshots and lifecycle is also much easier than without it.