Management Tools

There are a several options available to manage kvm virtual machines:

(Please keep this list in alphabetical order)

Name/URL	Description	UI Type	Last Updated	Notes	License
Abiquo	Abiquo is a technology-agnostic solution for enterprises and service providers who want to quickly and simply build, manage and develop public and private clouds based on their existing heterogeneous environments.	Web, REST	Active	KVM, Xen, VirtualBox, VMware, Hyper-V & XenServer support; uses libvirt	Commercial
Archipel	Archipel is an Open Source project that aims to bring push notifications to virtualization orchestration using XMPP.	Web	Active	KVM, Xen, Virtual Box & OpenVZ support; uses libvirt	AGPL v3
AQemu	a Qt4 user interface for KVM	Desktop	2013-05-30		GPL v2
cloonix	cloonix is a virtualization management framework aimed at virtual networks building based on kvm.	Gui/cli	Active	KVM	RPL Licence
CloudStack	Cloudstack is an open source project that enables the deployment, management, and configuration of multi-tier and multi-tenant infrastructure cloud services using Xen, KVM and VMware hypervisors.	Web	Active	KVM, Xen & VMware support	Apache License v2
ConVirt	ConVirt 2.0 Open Source is the leading open source product for managing Xen and KVM, enabling you to standardize and proactively manage your virtualized environment in a centralized fashion.	Web	Active	Xen & KVM; formerly known as xenman	GPL v2
Enomaly	a programmable virtual cloud infrastructure for small, medium and large businesses	Web, REST	Not available as of 2010-02-08	they have commercial and open source editions	Commercial/AGPL v3
Eucalyptus	Eucalyptus is open source software for building AWS-compatible private and hybrid clouds. Eucalyptus allows IT organizations to build an on-premises Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud that pools together compute, storage, and network resources. With Eucalyptus, developers can leverage knowledge and tools around AWS APIs, including EC2, S3, EBS, IAM, Auto Scaling, Elastic Load Balancing, and CloudWatch. IT can create a flexible hybrid cloud environment so that developers can develop sooner, test more, and deploy faster while giving IT and cloud admins greater control of cloud performance, scale, and security.	Web, CLI, REST, SOAP	Active	Supports KVM and VMware. Uses libvirt. View the Eucalyptus Compatibility Matrix: http://bit.ly/QfH4Iv	GPL v3
Foreman	Foreman is aimed to be a Single Address For All Machines Life Cycle Management including bare metal / vm / cloud provisioning, configuration managememnt and configureation reports/auditing using puppet	Web, REST, CLI	Active	KVM, VMWare, oVirt RHEV-M, EC2, OpenStack	GPL v3
Ganeti	Ganeti is a cluster virtual server management software tool built on top of existing virtualization technologies	CLI	Active	KVM support added in Ganeti 2.0	GPL v2
GKVM	A Gnome user interface for KVM.	Desktop	2007-08-01		GPL v2
Karesansui	Karesansui is an open-source virtualization management application. It's smart graphical user interface lowers your management cost, and brings a total management/audit solution for both physical and virtual servers.	Web, REST	November 2013	KVM & Xen support; uses libvirt	LGPL v2.1/GPL v2
kimchi	Kimchi is an HTML5 based management tool for KVM. It is designed to make it as easy as possible to get started with KVM and create your first guest.	WEB	Active	KVM	LGPL,Apache License v2
Kubevirt	Virtualization API for Kubernetes	CLI, API	Active	Run VMs in Kubernetes	Apache License v2
kvmadm	a minimalistic set of command-line tools to control multi-user utilization of KVM	CLI	2007-09-25		GPL v2
kvmupdown	simple, robust and no-bloat management interface.	CLI	Link broken, probably terminated project	KVM	public domain
kvm-admin	Python scripts for managing the guests (boot, shutdown ...) and include a commandline monitor .	CLI	Active	kvm support	GPL v2
kvm-wrapper	kvm-wrapper is a lightweight, simple and intended to be hackable set of shell scripts that help manage kvm virtual machines a great deal.	CLI	Active	KVM support	WTFPL (v2)
Mist.io	Mist.io provides a unifed dashboard / API for managing your entire infrastructure - public and private clouds, KVM and VMware hypervisors, bare metal, and containers. You can install the open-source version or use the freemium service. Try it out	Web, Mobile, REST API, CLI	Active	Uses libvirt and libcloud for VM management. Supports KVM, several public cloud providers, OpenStack, Docker and bare metal servers.	AGPL v3 for the open source version, Commercial for the service
Morpheus	Morpheus provides a single dashboard for managing hybrid infrastructure - KVM, Xen, VMware hypervisors, public clouds, bare metal, and containers. Learn more.	UI, API, and CLI	Active		Commercial (community licensing for testing and lab environments; up to 25 workloads and 3 clouds)
nbsvm	No Bullshit VMs. No setup required. No dependencies but sudo, and LVM or ZFS. Start, stop, create and clone images and view VMs using simple chained commands. Basically applies sane (overridden by cli or file) defaults to the kvm invocation and gets out of the way. Sudo invocation is designed to allow user access controls.	CLI	February 2014		WTFPL 2
Nimbula Director	Nimbula Director is a Cloud Operating System that enables Infrastructure as a Service using the KVM.	Web, CLI, REST	Active	KVM support	Commercial (Freemium)
op5	op5 develops and delivers op5 Monitor a enterprise-class software for IT monitoring and administration of the whole IT. op5 developed a KVM plug-in to monitor KVM virtualization infrastructure that allows organizations to have better capacity planning, which enables the provisioning of usage of resources such as storage, CPU, and memory more proactively.	Web, REST	Active	Uses libvirt	GPL v2
OpenNebula	an open source virtual infrastructure engine	CLI, XML-RPC	Active	cloud computing managment; uses libvirt	Apache License v2
OpenNode	RHEL/CentOS based open-source server virtualization and management solution - simple bare-metal installer, providing KVM+OpenVZ host and standard libvirt, func management interfaces together with standard cli tools like virsh and vzctl. OpenNode Management Server with ajax web-based management console available - as is RPC-JSON API interface.	Web, CLI, API	Active	Bare-metal installer, KVM, OpenVZ hypervizors and variety of management tools	Unknown
openQRM	openQRM is the next generation, open-source Data-center management platform.	Web	Active	KVM, Xen, VMware and Linux V-Server support	GPL v2
oVirt	oVirt is a virtualization management framework constisting of a small host image, the oVirt Node, that provides the libvirt service to host virtual machines, and a robust vm management software stack, controlled by a web-based management interface, the oVirt Server.	Web	Active	uses libvirt	Apache License v2
Platform9 Managed OpenStack	Platform9 makes it very easy to manage a KVM environment with resource pooling and automation. Platform9's Openstack service easily integrates with any new or existing Linux servers. KVM expertise is helpful but not required. The OpenStack service supports major Linux distributions including CentOS, RHEL & Ubuntu. See the demos for KVM.	UI, OpenStack CLI, OpenStack API & integrations (puppet, ansible, chef, vagrant, etc).	Active	Fast, Easy & Affordable for anyone familiar with Linux. See KVM Management w/ OpenStack.	Commercial. A free trial is available.
Proxmox VE	Proxmox Virtual Environment (Proxmox VE) is an open-source server virtualization management platform to manage VMs and containers. The Debian-based platform uses KVM as hypervisor and also provides OS-level virtualization using LXC containers. It provides enterprise-class features like clustering, high availability, networking, live migration, backup/restore, integrates a built-in firewall and come with various storage plugins such as LVM, LVM-thin, iSCSI/kernel, iSCSI/libiscsi, Ceph/RBD, Sheepdog, ZFS over iSCSI, ZFS (local), directory, NFS, CIFS, and GlusterFS.	Web, CLI, API	Active	Bare-metall ISO installer including KVM and LXC management tools	AGPL v3
PVM	( PDNSoft Virtual Machine Management System) is a hypervisor based on KVM.It provides new application stack to manage KVM virtual machines instead of using Libvirt with it's own considerations.Cluster and user awareness is specific features in PVM design, so managing of HA and other features is done by PVM application stack that is placed directly on KVM.	Desktop,CLI	Active	Bar-metall installer	Commercial
Plain qemu/kvm	You can run qemu/kvm straight from the command line	CLI	Active	See man (qemu-system-x86_64 or kvm or qemu-kvm) for more info	GPL v2
Red Hat Virtualization / RHV	Commercial management solution for RHEL / KVM.	Web	Active		Commercial
SolusVM	The most popular control panel for commercial use.	Web	Active	KVM, Xen & OpenVZ support	Commercial
Stackops Openstack Distro	Stackops is an Openstack Nova distribution verified and tested for KVM. You only need to download the ISO image with the distro and install it on one or more servers.	CLI, REST	Active	KVM & QEMU (libvirt based)	Apache License v2
UVMM	UCS Virtual Machine Manager (UVMM) is an easy-to-use and powerful administration tool for KVM. It virtualizes Microsoft Windows, Univention Corporate Server and other Linux distributions by providing all the necessary functions for creating and managing virtual instances (also OpenStack and Amazon EC2-based resources) and hard drives on physical servers centrally via a web-based modern interface. On AWS it also manages Virtual Private Clouds (VPC). UVMM is included in Univention Corporate Server by default, an easy-to-use and scalable Enterprise distribution with an integrated management system for the central management of heterogeneous environments.	Web, CLI	Active	Supports KVM, Uses libvirt	Free for use, AGPL v3
virsh	A minimal shell around libvirt for managing VMs	CLI	Active	Uses libvirt	LGPL
Virtualbricks	Python-gtk GUI to manage guest and hybrid (host/guest) networks.	CLI	2011-11-23	kvm, qemu, ksm & VDE support	GPL v2
VMM / Virtual Machine Manager	Also known as virt-manager. A desktop user interface for managing virtual machines.	Desktop	Active	Uses libvirt	GPL v2
VMM's supporting tools virt-install/clone/convert	Command line tools for provisioning new VMs, cloning existing VMs and importing / converting appliance images.	CLI	Active	Uses libvirt	GPL v2
VMmanager	Software solution for virtualization management that can be used both for hosting virtual machines and building a cloud. With VMmanager you can manage not only one server, but a large cluster of hypervisors. It delivers a number of functions, such as live migration that allows for load balancing between cluster nodes, monitoring CPU, memory and I/O operation enabling to detect problematic nodes, use of local and networks storages, and many tools for efficient management.	Web, CLI, REST	Active	KVM, uses libvirt	Commercial
vmmaestro	vmmaestro is a tiny shell script which can start/stop/monitor KVM guests.	CLI	Active	KVM	MIT License
VM-King	VM-King is an Android App that allows you to manage your hypervisior remotely from your Android mobile or tablet. This app supports the following functions: Start/stop/destroy VM, restore and delete snapshots, get screenshot of running VMs, get remote display connection information (VNC/Spice).	mobile, tablet	Active	KVM	free
WebVirtMgr	Web service for managing VMs based on the KVM	WEB	Active	Only KVM; use libvirt	Apache License v2
Witsbits	Witsbits enables you to set up your servers with virtualization and deploy virtual machines faster than ever before. It’s a complete virtualization solution with a self-upgrading hypervisor and cloud-based centralized management, reducing time spent on maintenance to a fraction of what other solutions require. The self-configuring hypervisor comes as a Live CD, delivering the fastest time-to-deployment by removing the need for spending time on installation and configuration.	Web	Active	Live CD Hypervisor with SaaS Management System	Free for 5 CPUs (full version)