transient 0.3

A QEMU wrapper adding vagrant support and shared folders

transient

transient is a utility for runing QEMU with existing disk images and shared folders. Currently transient only supports Vagrant images.

Usage

transient is primarily a wrapper for QEMU. It supplies a small set of flags that are used to add additional features to the VM being started. As the name implies, it is almost completely stateless. This avoids problems that can sometimes occur with libvirt based tools becoming 'unsynchronized' with the real system state.

For example, in the following command, the flags before the -- are passed to transient. The remaining arguments are passed directly to QEMU. This example will cause transient to download and run a Centos7 VM (from the Vagrant Cloud) with 1GB of memory using a text console. The name parameter is used to allow subseqent invocations to use the same disk image, so changes will persist.

python -m transient \
   -name test-vm \
   -image centos/7:2004.01 \
   -- \
   -nographic -enable-kvm -m 1G

transient also supports a vagrant style SSH connection. This will start the virtual machine and connect standard input and output to an SSH connection with the machine, instead of the serial console. However, when this connection is closed, the machine will be terminated (unlike vagrant). For example:

python -m transient \
   -name test-vm \
   -ssh-console \
   -image centos/7:2004.01 \
   -- \
   -enable-kvm -m 1G

The -ssh-console flag depends on the image having the normal vagrant keypair trusted for the vagrant user.