libvirt: fetch ipv4 address from guest

Jochen picture Jochen · Sep 27, 2013 · Viewed 33.7k times · Source

I am looking for a solution to fetch the ipv4 address or other metadata of a VM running on qemu/kvm with libvirt? I've also looked into ovirt guest agent and qemu guest agent, but I was wondering if there's a better/easier way to fetch this data?

Basically I have a couple of hosts running KVM and for each specific private ip address I need to be able to know which VM is running with that ip address (provided by a DHCP server).

Answer

Peter Lemenkov picture Peter Lemenkov · Oct 2, 2013

I'm installing avahi on each VM, so they will advertise their own addresses. However that's not the only option available (especiall if you VM contains something different from Linux). So enter magical world of virsh options!

*) First you need to get MAC addresses of your VM's NICs:

[root@5844 ~]# virsh domiflist b2bua
Interface  Type       Source     Model       MAC
-------------------------------------------------------
vnet0      network    default    virtio      52:54:00:aa:bb:cc
vnet1      bridge     br1        virtio      52:54:00:dd:ee:ff

[root@5844 ~]#

*) Now let's take a look at the ARP table

[root@5844 ~]# arp -e
 Address                  HWtype  HWaddress           Flags Mask            Iface
 xx.xx.xx.xx              ether   xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx   C                     br0
 192.168.122.14           ether   52:54:00:xx:xx:xx   C                     virbr0
 192.168.122.51           ether   52:54:00:aa:bb:cc   C                     virbr0
 [root@5844 ~]# 

*) Now let's glue everything together (and adding a bit of shell/regex magic):

[root@5844 ~]# for mac in `virsh domiflist b2bua |grep -o -E "([0-9a-f]{2}:){5}([0-9a-f]{2})"` ; do arp -e |grep $mac  |grep -o -P "^\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}" ; done
192.168.122.51
[root@5844 ~]#