Libvirt

libvirt is an open-source API, daemon and management tool for managing platform virtualization.^[3] It can be used to manage KVM, Xen, VMware ESXi, QEMU and other virtualization technologies. These APIs are widely used in the orchestration layer of hypervisors in the development of a cloud-based solution.

libvirt
Developer(s)	Red Hat
Initial release	December 19, 2005; 19 years ago (2005-12-19)[1]
Stable release	11.5.0[2] / 1 July 2025; 21 days ago (1 July 2025)
Repository	gitlab.com/libvirt/libvirt
Written in	C
Operating system	Linux, FreeBSD, Windows, macOS[3]
Type	Library
License	GNU Lesser General Public License
Website	libvirt.org

Internals

libvirt supports several Hypervisors and is supported by several management solutions

libvirt is a C library with bindings in other languages, notably in Python,^[4] Perl,^[5] OCaml,^[6] Ruby,^[7] Java,^[8] JavaScript (via Node.js)^[9] and PHP.^[10] libvirt for these programming languages is composed of wrappers around another class/package called libvirtmod. libvirtmod's implementation is closely associated with its counterpart in C/C++ in syntax and functionality.

Supported Hypervisors

• LXC – lightweight Linux container system
• OpenVZ – lightweight Linux container system
• Kernel-based Virtual Machine/QEMU (KVM) – open-source hypervisor for Linux and SmartOS^[11]
• Xen – bare-metal hypervisor
• User-mode Linux (UML) – paravirtualized kernel
• VirtualBox – hypervisor by Oracle (formerly by Sun) for Windows, Linux, macOS, and Solaris
• VMware ESXi and GSX – hypervisors for Intel hardware
• VMware Workstation and Player – hypervisors for Windows and Linux
• Hyper-V – hypervisor for Windows by Microsoft
• PowerVM – hypervisor by IBM for AIX, Linux and IBM i
• Bhyve – hypervisor for FreeBSD 10+^[12] (support added with libvirt 1.2.2)

User Interfaces

Various virtualization programs and platforms use libvirt. Virtual Machine Manager, GNOME Boxes and others provide graphical interfaces. The most popular command line interface is virsh, and higher level tools such as oVirt.^[13]

Corporate

Development of libvirt is backed by Red Hat,^[14] with significant contributions by other organisations and individuals. libvirt is available on most Linux distributions; remote servers are also accessible from Apple Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows clients.^[15]

See also

• Free and open-source software portal

• SPICE
• libguestfs
• Linux range of use § Virtualizing