Today I finished off a tool which everyone has been asking for, virt-ifconfig – list the IP addresses of your virtual machines:
# virt-ifconfig Guest Iface Family IP address CentOS5x32 eth0 inet 192.168.122.17 CentOS5x32 eth0 inet6 fe80::5652:ff:fe3c:7611
You can grab some very experimental source code from this repository.
Next up will be: virt-ps, virt-uname, virt-route, virt-dmesg, and more …
Richard WM Jones 
Do you have a roadmap concerning the number of commands you’ll be creating in the virt- namespace?
Perhaps before you go to far down into the rabbit hole would it make more sense to modify the existing programs so that virtual client functionality is appended as an additional set of optional parameters to the existing programs? Just something to consider as an alternative to doubling the size of /sbin/ /bin/ directory listings.
-jef
Jef:
I would be surprised if it’s more than a dozen commands. Let’s see:
virt-df
virt-edit
virt-cat
virt-top
virt-ifconfig
virt-ps
virt-route
virt-uname
virt-dmesg
maybe virt-iptables and virt-kill
The aim is just to allow users to collect routine statistics and diagnose simple problems. For complex stuff, sysadmins will just have to log into the VM.
(For comparison, my current /bin and /sbin has 392 files).
The problem with combining them is that we don’t offer all of the existing options. For example “virt-ps” is very much equivalent to running “ps ax” in the guest, and there is no other option supported (if you want to see fewer processes you have to filter them yourself). The other problem is that these commands require a lot of machinery to work, most of it written in Perl, which isn’t conducive to inclusion in those upstream projects.
Rich.
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