As I am in the libvirt group, I will run it as a regular user. The virt-install tool must be run as root, or the user must be in the libvirt group. It connects the guest console to the serial console. The following command will create a Debian 11 guest named debian-server with 2048 MiB (2 GiB) of RAM, 2 virtual CPUs, 20 GiB qcow2 virtual disk, and 1 network interface card (NIC). If you haven’t already installed KVM, please check out my other blog on how to install KVM on Linux and run guest OS faster.ġ. If you want to install guest OS using Virtual Machine Manager, take a look at my other blog on How to Install Guest OS in Virt-Manager: A Quick Intro. I will use Debian 11 as an example, but it may also be another OS. While virt-install also supports graphical installations using SPICE or VNC, I will only focus on text mode installs over the serial console. In this blog, I’m going to show you how to install a KVM guest OS from the command-line using the virt-install tool. The serial console also comes in handy when you cannot ssh into your virtual machine due to some connectivity issues, or when you want to provide a LUKS password during startup. Generally, the first serial port on the guest VM ( /dev/ttyS0) is used for the serial console.

It provides an alternative way of accessing your servers by replacing the default graphical consoles. Interaction with a serial console is similar to using a text-based terminal without a graphical interface or mouse. So, the way to install a KVM guest OS from the command-line on such systems is through a serial console using the virt-install tool. Without the GUI, it is not possible to use tools such as virt-manager or virt-viewer. On most Linux servers, the only interface available to you will be a command-line interface.

Libvirt xml serial console