How To: Update VM Title with virsh

Use virsh desc command to update VM title in KVM Use virsh desc command to update VM title in KVM

I’m updating and migrating the last few of virtual machines on one of my servers, and realised that there’s a virsh list command option that I really like: it shows descriptive titles in addition to just listing virtual machines.

You know, how we usually run virsh list to see the VMs currently running on a server?

root@s2:/ # virsh list
Id Name State
----------------------------------------------------
1 elk running
4 dbm1 running
6 v9.ts.im running
9 infra running

Well, these VM names aren’t terribly informative. So I like using the virsh list –title command to show the list of VMs with their proper titles:

root@s2:/ # virsh list --title
Id Name State Title
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 elk running Elastic + Logstash + Kibana
4 dbm1 running
6 v9.ts.im running wiki [4vCPU 4GB]
9 infra running infra [4 vCPU 4GB]

And if any VMs are not showing descriptive titles yet, it’s very easy to add it (–live means “apply to the running instance of the VM” and –config means “update the VM information on the disk”). Here’s an example forth dbm1 VM:

root@s2:/ # virsh desc dbm1 --title "MariaDB server [4vCPU 4GB]" --live --config
Domain title updated successfully

…and if we check again, dbm1 VM is now sporting a brand new description:

root@s2:/ # virsh list --title
Id Name State Title
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 elk running Elastic + Logstash + Kibana
4 dbm1 running MariaDB server [4vCPU 4GB]
6 v9.ts.im running wiki [4vCPU 4GB]
9 infra running infra [4 vCPU 4GB]



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