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VIRT-WHO(8) System Manager's Manual VIRT-WHO(8)

NAME

virt-who - Agent for reporting virtual guest IDs to Subscription Asset Manager, Satellite 6, or Satellite 5.

SYNOPSIS

virt-who [-d] [-i INTERVAL] [-o]

OPTIONS

show this help message and exit
Enable debugging output
Send the list of guest IDs and exit immediately
Acquire and send guest information each N seconds; note that this option is recommendation only, requested interval might not been honoured and the actual interval might be longer or shorter depending on backend that is used.
Print the host/guests association in JSON format to standard output
Use configuration file directly (will override configuration from other files. 'global' and 'default' sections are not read in files passed in via this option, and are only read from /etc/virt-who.conf). Can be used multiple times. See virt-who-config(5) for details about configuration file format.
[Deprecated] Write one log file per configured virtualization backend. Implies a log_dir of /var/log/rhsm/virtwho. (Default: all messages are written to a single log file)
[Deprecated] The absolute path of the directory to log to. (Default '/var/log/rhsm')
[Deprecated] The file name to write logs to. (Default 'rhsm.log')
[Deprecated] Label host/guest associations obtained by this instance of virt-who with the provided id.

ENVIRONMENT

virt-who also reads environmental variables. They have the same name as command line arguments but upper-cased, with underscore instead of dash and prefixed with VIRTWHO_ (e.g. VIRTWHO_ONE_SHOT). Empty variables are considered as disabled, non-empty as enabled

USAGE

MODE

virt-who has three modes how it can run:

1. one-shot mode
# virt-who -o

In this mode virt-who just sends the host to guest association to the server once and then exits.

2. interval mode
# virt-who -i INTERVAL

This is default mode. virt-who will listen to change events (if available) or do a polling with given interval, and will send the host to guest association when it changes. The default polling interval is 3600 seconds and can be changed using "-i INTERVAL" (in seconds).

3. print mode
# virt-who -p

This mode is similar to oneshot mode but the host to guest association is not send to server, but printed to standard output instead.

LOGGING

virt-who always writes error output to file /var/log/rhsm/rhsm.log. It also writes the same output to standard error output when started from command line.

virt-who can be started with option "-d" in all modes and with all backends. This option will enable verbose output with more information.

SECURITY

Virt-who may present security concerns in some scenarios because it needs access to every hypervisor in the environment. To minimize security risk, virt-who is a network client, not a server. It only does outbound connections to find and register new hypervisors and does not need access to any virtual machines. To further reduce risk, deploy virt-who in a small virtual machine with a minimal installation and lock it down from any unsolicited inbound network connections.

Here is a list of ports that need to be open for different hypervisors:


VMWare ESX/vCenter: 443/tcp
Hyper-V: 5985/tcp
RHEV-M: 443/tcp or 8443/tcp (depending on version)
XenServer: 443/tcp
libvirt: depending on transport type, default (for remote connections) is qemu over ssh on port 22
local libvirt and vdsm use local connections and don't need open ports
kubevirt: 8443/tcp

virt-who also needs to have access to Subscription Asset Manager, Satellite 5, or Satellite 6. Default port is 443/tcp. All the ports might be changed by system administrators.

Using the same network for machine running virt-who as for hypervisor management software instead of production VM networks is suggested.

AUTHOR

Radek Novacek <rnovacek at redhat dot com>

April 2016 virt-who