qemu
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Virtual Machine Manager
About VMM's supporting tools The "Virt Install" tool (virt-install for short command name, virtinst for package name) is a command line tool which provides an easy way to provision operating systems into virtual machines. It also provides an API to the virt-manager application for its graphical VM creation wizard. The "Virt Clone" tool (virt-clone for short command name, virtinst for package name) is a command line tool for cloning existing inactive guests. It copies the disk images, and defines a config with new name, UUID and MAC address pointing to the copied disks. The "Virt Image" tool (virt-image for short command name, virtinst for package name) is a command line tool for installing guest operating systems based on a pre-defined master image.
In the wise words of Wikipedia, "Virtualisation is a broad term that refers to the abstraction of computer resources". Within this definition sits a whole variety of products - Sun's VirtualBox, Parallels, Bochs, Xen, KVM, Qemu, various flavours of VMware and many others. And there's a great deal of jargon to confuse the unwary - emulation, full virtualisation, paravirtualisation, virtual appliance, hypervisor... the list goes on. And not everyone agrees exactly what all these terms actually mean. We're going to deliberately sidestep the jargon and the hype to take a practical look at the virtualisation technologies in Ubuntu, in particular KVM and Qemu and the related userspace tools that create and manage virtual machines. Although the discussion centres on Ubuntu, the technology is applicable to all Linux distros.
Howto: Linux and Windows virtualization with KVM and Qemu | TuxRadar Linux
Ubuntu uses KVM as the back-end virtualization technology primarily for non-graphic servers and libvirt as its toolkit/API. Libvirt front ends for managing VMs include virt-manager (GUI) or virsh (CLI). Alternative management options include convirt (GUI) or convirt2 (WWW). The use case targeted when KVM was moved into main is "server virtualization" .
The Kernel Virtual Machine - Community Ubuntu Documentation
Chapter 17. Virtualization
Virtualization is being adopted in many different environments and situations. If you are a developer, virtualization can provide you with a contained environment where you can safely do almost any sort of development safe from messing up your main working environment. If you are a systems administrator, you can use virtualization to more easily separate your services and move them around based on demand. The default virtualization technology supported in Ubuntu is KVM , a technology that takes advantage of virtualization extensions built into Intel and AMD hardware.
