21.9. virt-inspector: Inspecting Guest Virtual Machines

This section provides information about inspecting guest virtual machines.

21.9.1. Introduction

virt-inspector is a tool for inspecting a disk image to find out what operating system it contains.

21.9.2. Installation

To install virt-inspector and the documentation, enter the following command: 
# yum install libguestfs-tools
The documentation, including example XML output and a Relax-NG schema for the output, will be installed in /usr/share/doc/libguestfs-devel-*/ where * is replaced by the version number of libguestfs.

21.9.3. Running virt-inspector

You can run virt-inspector against any disk image or libvirt guest virtual machine as shown in the following example: 
$ virt-inspector -a disk.img > report.xml
Or as shown here: 
$ virt-inspector -d GuestName > report.xml
The result will be an XML report (report.xml). The main components of the XML file are a top-level <operatingsytems> element containing usually a single <operatingsystem> element, similar to the following: 
 <operatingsystems>
   <operatingsystem>

     <!-- the type of operating system and Linux distribution -->
     <name>linux</name>
     <distro>rhel</distro>
     <!-- the name, version and architecture -->
     <product_name>Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 6.4 </product_name>
     <major_version>6</major_version>
     <minor_version>4</minor_version>
     <package_format>rpm</package_format>
     <package_management>yum</package_management>
     <root>/dev/VolGroup/lv_root</root> 
     <!-- how the filesystems would be mounted when live -->
     <mountpoints>
       <mountpoint dev="/dev/VolGroup/lv_root">/</mountpoint>
       <mountpoint dev="/dev/sda1">/boot</mountpoint>
       <mountpoint dev="/dev/VolGroup/lv_swap">swap</mountpoint>
     </mountpoints>

    < !-- filesystems-->
      <filesystem dev="/dev/VolGroup/lv_root">
        <label></label>
        <uuid>b24d9161-5613-4ab8-8649-f27a8a8068d3</uuid>
        <type>ext4</type>
        <content>linux-root</content>
        <spec>/dev/mapper/VolGroup-lv_root</spec>
      </filesystem>
      <filesystem dev="/dev/VolGroup/lv_swap">
        <type>swap</type>
        <spec>/dev/mapper/VolGroup-lv_swap</spec>
      </filesystem>
     <!-- packages installed -->
     <applications>
       <application>
         <name>firefox</name>
         <version>3.5.5</version>
         <release>1.fc12</release>
       </application>
     </applications>

   </operatingsystem>
 </operatingsystems>
Processing these reports is best done using W3C standard XPath queries. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 comes with the xpath command-line program, which can be used for simple instances. However, for long-term and advanced usage, you should consider using an XPath library along with your favorite programming language.
As an example, you can list out all file system devices using the following XPath query: 
$ virt-inspector GuestName | xpath //filesystem/@dev
 Found 3 nodes:
 -- NODE --
 dev="/dev/sda1"
 -- NODE --
 dev="/dev/vg_f12x64/lv_root"
 -- NODE --
 dev="/dev/vg_f12x64/lv_swap"
Or list the names of all applications installed by entering: 
$ virt-inspector GuestName | xpath //application/name
 [...long list...]