I'm pleased to announce this very early pre-alpha release of a further set of tools for monitoring virtual machines. The idea is to provide simple commands which can be run outside the virtual machine to monitor its status. These commands don't require you to log in to the virtual machine, or to install any software, since they work entirely by snooping. So they could be very useful for analyzing guests which are stuck / unresponsive / heavily loaded. Done so far: virt-uname like uname(1), print guest's system information virt-dmesg like dmesg(1), print guest's kernel messages Coming soon: virt-ps like ps(1), lists processes virt-free like free(1), lists free memory and swap If virt-ps works out, I might do a 'top'-like command, although of course I can't call it virt-top. I'm open to other suggestions too. Home page: http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-mem/ Source: http://hg.et.redhat.com/virt/applications/virt-mem--devel ****NOTE**** These require a (forthcoming) patch to libvirt to snoop on virtual machines' memory. At the moment you can run them by using the QEMU memsave command to snapshot kernel memory to a file, and then run the program on the file. The snapshot process is described here: http://felinemenace.org/~andrewg/MikroTik_Router_Security_Analysis_Part2/ Support for Xen is still under investigation, but we believe it should be possible. Example: (qemu) memsave 3222274048 15728640 snap.mem $ virt-uname -A i386 -T i386 -t ~/snap.mem /home/rjones/snap.mem: Linux localhost.localdomain 2.6.24-0.155.rc7.git6.fc9 #1 SMP Tue Jan 15 17:52:31 EST 2008 i686 (none) Rich. -- Richard Jones, Emerging Technologies, Red Hat http://et.redhat.com/~rjones virt-p2v converts physical machines to virtual machines. Boot with a live CD or over the network (PXE) and turn machines into Xen guests. http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-p2v