Kvm

bumped into this one by accident while looking for something else, but it’s most handy to keep an eye on the local VMs from the console1, including network and disk I/O! it could have come in handy a year ago… virt-top obtains the data from libvirt, so you need to have that going first. on the positive side, perhaps the libvirt indirection will allow it to support stuff other than KVM (i may have seen Xen mentioned somewhere).

NOTE: the below assumes you’re running the VMs in NAT mode. nowadays most distros are very good at acquiring dynamic IP addys from DHCP servers during the install process, and libvirt comes with a lightweight DHCP server (as part of dnsmasq) which works just fine for the job at hand. however, sometimes it’s handy to ensure your VMs have static IPs while playing around, e.g. on a lappy.