Setting user permissions in KVM

• June 20, 2015
• linux  
• virtualization  
• infrastructure  

In a previous article I mentioned how to install a library in Fedora, in order to make KVM virtualization easier, managing the NAT network configuration between the guest virtual machine and the host, by means of libvirt.

Besides that, while using KVM locally for development, I use virt-manager, a helpful application that manages the different virtual machines. This application, as well as the rest of the commands that interact with libvirt (virsh for example), require super user privileges, so it will prompt for the sudo password every time.

This can be avoided by including the user into the following groups: kvm, and libvirt.

Therefore, just by running the following command we can skip the password prompt every time.

sudo usermod -a -G kvm,libvirt mariano

This is an option I would use only for local development on my machine. Productive environments must have an strict permissions management.