If you've been using Fedora for very long, you're probably familiar with cockpit. It's a web-based management dashboard console. You can add users, change network settings, configure file systems, manage security, and do system updates all via the cockpit dashboard in your browser. This handy for servers because you don't need a GUI installed in order to run it. But it works fine from desktop systems as well. Cockpit is too big to cover here, and that isn't what this review is about. It's only about the VM manager in cockpit. Maybe I'll do another review of other parts of cockpit in the future.
This is actually pretty basic, but when you open the virtual machines tab in cockpit. You see.. what else, a list of the VMs.
Note: This ONLY works with Qemu/KVM, not VirtualBox or VMware. There is a podman/docker plugin, but this article is only about VMs.
If I click on one of the VMs, I can seeall the information about that VM. I can create VMs, and even download iso images via the VM manager in cockpit. It's pretty handy I can do all of this remotely in a browser, never needing to login locally on that computer. It can even be done from windows. In fact all the screenshots today were taken with the snipping tool, not the usual spectacle that I usually use.
There is a console tab if you want to login to the command line console if you want to.
However there is also a spice desktop viewer option as well. If you're doing this from a Windows PC you will need to install "virt-viewer".
You don't need the entire virt-manager at the top, only the virt-viewer at the bottom. Make sure you get the 64-bit version, I installed the 32-bit version and it didn't work on my system. I had to delete it and re-install the 64-bit version. You will probably need to open port 5901 on your firewall for this to work.
But once you get it setup, you can have remote desktop sessions to your VMs. Similar to proxmox, but a lot easier to manage.
(Although proxmox has more "power" options for more advanced admins). Here you see Ubuntu25 and Fedora42 living peacefully side by side. You can have as many desktops as you have VMs, you are only limited by your screen size.
Creating a new VM is pretty straight-forward. Very similar to how you would do it in virtualBox, Qemu/KVM or VMware.
But again, the main advantage is the ability to do all of this remotely through a browser.
This is actually pretty basic, but when you open the virtual machines tab in cockpit. You see.. what else, a list of the VMs.
Note: This ONLY works with Qemu/KVM, not VirtualBox or VMware. There is a podman/docker plugin, but this article is only about VMs.
If I click on one of the VMs, I can seeall the information about that VM. I can create VMs, and even download iso images via the VM manager in cockpit. It's pretty handy I can do all of this remotely in a browser, never needing to login locally on that computer. It can even be done from windows. In fact all the screenshots today were taken with the snipping tool, not the usual spectacle that I usually use.
There is a console tab if you want to login to the command line console if you want to.
However there is also a spice desktop viewer option as well. If you're doing this from a Windows PC you will need to install "virt-viewer".
You don't need the entire virt-manager at the top, only the virt-viewer at the bottom. Make sure you get the 64-bit version, I installed the 32-bit version and it didn't work on my system. I had to delete it and re-install the 64-bit version. You will probably need to open port 5901 on your firewall for this to work.
But once you get it setup, you can have remote desktop sessions to your VMs. Similar to proxmox, but a lot easier to manage.
(Although proxmox has more "power" options for more advanced admins). Here you see Ubuntu25 and Fedora42 living peacefully side by side. You can have as many desktops as you have VMs, you are only limited by your screen size.
Creating a new VM is pretty straight-forward. Very similar to how you would do it in virtualBox, Qemu/KVM or VMware.
But again, the main advantage is the ability to do all of this remotely through a browser.
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