Accessing KVM Guest Using Virtual Serial Console
by Alpha01
For the longest time, after creating my KVM guest virtual machines, I’ve only used virt-manager afterwards to do any sort of remote non-direct ssh connection. It wasn’t until now that I finally decided to start using the serial console feature of KVM, and I have to say, I kind of regret procrastinating on this, because this feature is really convenient.
Enabling serial console access to a guest VM is a relatively easy process.
In CentOS, it’s simply a matter of adding the following kernel parameter to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX
in /etc/default/grub
console=ttyS0
After adding the console
kernel parameter with the value of our virtual console’s device block file. Then we have to build new a grub menu and reboot:
grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg
Afterwards from the host system, you should be able to virsh console
onto the guest VM.
The only caveat with connecting to a guest using the virtual serial console is existing the console. In my case, the way to log off the console connection was using Ctrl+5 keyboard keys. This disconnection quirk reminded me of the good old days when I actually worked on physical servers and used IPMI’s serial over network feature and it’s associated unique key combination to properly close the serial connection.
Resources
- https://www.certdepot.net/rhel7-access-virtual-machines-console/
- https://superuser.com/questions/637669/how-to-exit-a-virsh-console-connection
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