virt-manager is a graphical tool for managing virtual machines through libvirt. Most usage is with QEMU/KVM virtual machines, but Xen and libvirt LXC containers are well supported.

Install virt-manager on Arch Linux

To install virt-manager on Arch Linux you just need to install the following packages:

sudo pacman -S virt-manager dnsmasq

virt-manager uses libvirt so you need to start libvirtd.service systemd unit.

Note: virt-manager uses dnsmasq in NAT network mode but you don’t need to start the dnsmasq service.

You could enable the systemd unit at boot time but I prefer to keep it disabled and only start the service when I am going to use it:

sudo systemd start libvirtd.service

The easiest way to ensure your user has access to the libvirt daemon is by adding your user to the libvirt group. Members of the libvirt group have passwordless access to the RW daemon socket by default.

sudo usermod -a -G libvirt <user>

Running VMs

If you use the NAT network mode, you will need to define and start a network in libvirt. By default libvirt has an XML network defined in /etc/libvirt/qemu/networks/default.xml. You can just use it easily by running:

sudo virsh

Then, in the virsh CLI, you can start it by:

virsh # net-start default

Alternatively, if you want to have it enabled by default every time you start the libvirtd service, you can run:

virsh # net-start default
virsh # net-autostart default


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