Configuration and Management

OpenVMM exposes three configuration and management interfaces. The CLI and interactive console support direct VM configuration and lifecycle operations, while gRPC and ttrpc provide programmatic control.

Interface compatibility

These interfaces continue to evolve and may change between releases. Consult the documentation for your OpenVMM version, especially when upgrading.

  • CLI: Used to configure and launch a single VM
    • This allows configuring static VM resource assignments, such as the number of processors, RAM size, UEFI, graphic console, etc.. as well as what devices are exposed to the Guest, such as a virtual NIC, Storage, vTPM, etc..
  • Interactive console: Used to interact with a VM at runtime
    • This interface allows users to perform core VM operations such as stop, restart, save, restore, pause, resume, etc.. as well as things like storage hot-add, VTL2 servicing, running Inspect queries, etc..
  • gRPC / ttrpc: Programmatic APIs for configuring and interacting with VMs. API compatibility and implementation coverage continue to evolve.

Management Capabilities

The following table summarizes the status of selected management features.

Feature Status
Suspend / Resume a VM OpenVMM's existing save/restore infrastructure theoretically supports this, but the end-to-end flow has not been wired up to any management interface at the moment.
Snapshots OpenVMM has core infrastructure for performing save/restore operations, but there are gaps in device support (notably: no support for storage snapshots).
Managing multiple running VMs

OpenVMM currently runs a single VM per-process.

It is not yet clear whether OpenVMM will support managing multiple VMs via a single OpenVMM process, or if OpenVMM will rely on external management tools (e.g: `libvirt`) interfacing with its existing APIs in order to launch and manage multiple VMs.

For additional feature requests and status information, search the OpenVMM GitHub issues.