I want to use the Virtual Machine Manager application in openSUSE to manage my virtual machines and networks. Before that, I needed to create some areas on the hard disk to store information used by the hypervisor as follows. From the command line in my home directory I typed:
mkdir ISO mkdir vmachines
This created two directories, one (ISO) for storing bootable images used to install virtual machines and the other (vmachines) to hold the virtual hard disks used by those machines. Now that’s done, I can launch the VMM application from ‘System’ -> ‘Virtual Machine Manager’
Double clicking on ‘QEMU/KVM’ promped me to input my root password and connected me to the hypervisor. Then, right clicking on ‘QEMU/KVM’ allowed me to select ‘Details’ which then gave me the following information pane about my hypervisor.
I first needed to tell the hypervisor where I was going to put bootable disk images for it to use. Clicking on the ‘Storage’ tab produced this window:
Call the new storage pool ‘ISO’
Then point to the newly created ISO directory created earlier.
Next, I created another new storage pool, but this time called it ‘VMachines’ and linked it to the ‘vmachines’ directory created earlier. Now my storage pools look like this:
Finally, I will go and fetch a copy of RouterOS for experimenting with Mikrotik routers. The file needed is on the Mikrotik download page. It is possible to fetch the file into the correct location on the hard disk via the command line as follows:
cd ~/ISO wget https://download2.mikrotik.com/routeros/6.39.1/mikrotik-6.39.1.iso
I could now add that ISO to the storage pool by clicking on the swirly arrow icon which made VMM re-read the contents of the ‘ISO’ storage pool allowing it to find the newly downloaded router software image.
Next time I will install the Mikrotik router as well as create some virtual networks for it to route between.