@whack IIRC virt-install doesn't provide great defaults for all the very useful libvirt options. I do love the whole tooling stack though so don't give up yet.

Try a manual install with virt-manager or even better gnome-boxes to get the right XML. Then use virsh edit to see it and use the snippets that work best.

I can give you access to a vmhost to play with if that would help.

Lastly my mgmtconfig project builds great XML when you use the virt resource, but I didn't optimize everywhere yet.

@purpleidea imo the libvirt docs are ... not good. There's a lot of docs, but all the stuff I find is endless manpage reference-like material and nothing about how the tools fit together.

I may abandon this exploration as I'm mostly-happy with qemu. virt-builder and virt-install are appealing because they can help automate some machine setup, but I'm already doing that with cloud-init on qemu. virt-builder *might* be a shortcut to support other distros that don't ship cloud-init images, though! I'll keep poking.

Here's the stuff I'm fiddling with:
https://github.com/jordansissel/experiments/tree/master/qemu

Main entry is 'fun.sh' which orchestrates building the disk image (w/ qemu + cloud-init) and running the vm. 'distros.rb' is just code to generate cloud-init for specific configurations.

I won't mind using libvirt if I can stop banging my head against its weirdness, otherwise I'll just stick with qemu directly.

@whack Virt-builder and it's author Rich are both brilliant. If you're just interested in a single occasional vm, you can get by with qemu, but if you want more serious stuff, libvirt wins my heart. Lots of docs here too (see tools on the right) https://libguestfs.org/

Mgmt res examples: https://github.com/purpleidea/mgmt/blob/master/examples/lang/virt1.mcl and https://github.com/purpleidea/mgmt/blob/master/examples/lang/virt-builder.mcl

and there's a sadly still undocumented virtualization "module" which does the right glue everywhere: https://github.com/purpleidea/mgmt/blob/master/modules/virtualization/main.mcl

I can patch with graphical too.

@purpleidea I went pretty deep into the weeds injecting packages and scripts into upstream OS images with guestfish/etc before deciding that I went a bit too far off of the beaten path lol

The VMs in this scope are going to be for automated testing; so in effect, they'll be short-lived and throw-away like docker containers. I'll probably have some tooling automatically build all the images frequently so I have a fresh set of disk images to test with on the latest releases. If I get along well enough with virt-builder, I'll experiment with mgmtconfig for operating it <3