What is 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.

Kimchi runs as a Wok plugin.

Kimchi manages KVM guests through libvirt. The management interface is accessed over the web using a browser that supports HTML5.

Getting Started

Install Dependencies

First of all, make sure to Wok and Ginger Base installed in your system. To add Kimchi plugin, please make sure to have all the dependencies installed before starting up the wokd service.

Build and Install

For openSUSE:
$ ./autogen.sh --with-spice-html5

Otherwise:
$ ./autogen.sh --system

$ make

# Optional if running from the source tree
$ sudo make install

Testing

$ make check-local
$ sudo make check

After all tests are executed, a summary will be displayed containing any errors/failures which might have occurred.

Usage

Connect your browser to https://localhost:8001. You should see a screen like:

By default, wok uses PAM to authenticate users so you can log in with the same username and password that you would use to log in to the machine itself. Once logged in you will see a screen like:

This shows you the list of running guests including a live screenshot of the guest session. You can use the action buttons to shutdown the guests or connect to the display in a new window.

To create a new guest, click on the "+" button in the upper right corner. In Kimchi, all guest creation is done through templates.

You can view or modify templates by clicking on the Templates link in the top navigation bar.

The template screen looks like:

From this view, you can change the parameters of a template or create a new template using the "+" button in the upper right corner.

To create a template, you need an ISO or image file on your host or use a remote one. If you are willing to use your own ISO, please copy it to out of box storage pool (default path is: /var/lib/kimchi/isos).

Troubleshooting

Server access

Please, check Wok configuration if you are getting problems to access Wok server.

NFS storage pool

Please, check the NFS export path permission is configured like below:

Export path need to be squashed as kvm gid and libvirt uid: /my_export_path *(all_squash,anongid=, anonuid=,rw,sync)

So that root user can create volume with right user/group.
Set libvirt user and kvm group for export path, in order to make sure all mapped user can get into the mount point.

Contributing to Kimchi Project

There are a lof of ways to contribute to the Kimchi Project:

Issues can be reported at Github
Patches are always welcome! Please, follow these instructions on how to send patches to the mailing list (kimchi-devel@ovirt.org).

Find more information about Wok Project at https://github.com/kimchi-project/kimchi/wiki