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virssh - allow users to control their libvirt VM through SSH.

virssh is a simple wrapper around sudo and virsh that allows users to control their libvirt VM(s) through SSH. Currently supported is starting/stopping VMs, serial console and listing all VMs to get their status. Authorization is done using SSH public keys.

Configuration

  1. Create a user "vmadmin".

  2. Give that user sudo permissions for calling virsh, so she may control (all) VMs:

  Defaults:vmadmin !requiretty
  vmadmin ALL = (root) NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/virsh
  
  1. For every one of your users, create a line in vmadmin's .ssh/authorized_keys using their SSH public keys:

    command="/usr/local/bin/virssh myfancyvm",permitopen="localhost:5915",no-X11-forwarding,no-agent-forwarding ssh-rsa AAAAB...== myfancyuser@hjome

    Instead of specifying only one VM "myfancyvm", you may also specify multiple VMs by regex, for example "(myfancyvm|myothervm)".

Usage

The user may now control her VM using the following commands:

    ssh -t vmadmin@vmserver sudo virsh list
    ssh -t vmadmin@vmserver sudo virsh console myfancyvm
    ssh -t vmadmin@vmserver sudo virsh destroy myfancyvm
    ssh -t vmadmin@vmserver sudo virsh shutdown myfancyvm
    ssh -t vmadmin@vmserver sudo virsh start myfancyvm
    ssh -t vmadmin@vmserver sudo virsh start myfancyvm --console
  

If you use a "permitopen" directive, that user may also use the console command to keep an SSH tunnel open to use VNC.