I run several virtual machines on a home server, and this setup works out quite well for a couple of reasons. First, the VMs can run tasks at any time without slowing down the machine I’m actively working on. Second, Virt-Manager is a pretty slick solution—it gives you access to local LXC containers, QEMU virtual machines, or even lets you connect to VMs on another server over SSH.
If you’re just looking for the front-end functionality of Virt-Manager, you might find this interesting: you don’t need to install all the QEMU and libvirt daemon packages!
On Debian Bookworm, when I try to install Virt-Manager, it tells me it’s going to install 107 new packages, using about 220MB of disk space. Now, that’s not a ton of space, but it is quite a few packages. So let’s try a leaner approach:
That only pulls in 22 packages, using around 25MB of disk space.
For those who don’t know, the --no-install-recommends option in apt tells it to skip non-essential (recommended) packages when installing software. It still grabs everything needed to run the software, but skips the extras that apt thinks most people might want. Usually, that’s fine—Debian actually splits packages pretty aggressively (and sometimes annoyingly so).
For example, you’ve probably noticed that nearly every package with development tools also has a separate -dev version. Or maybe you’ve seen how xscreensaver is split into four separate packages, even though it’s distributed as a single application by its author.
Oh, and unless you’re exclusively using serial consoles through libvirt, you’ll probably want SPICE support working too! That means installing a couple more packages—just over 2MB extra:
sudo apt install libspice-client-gtk-3.0-5 gir1.2-spiceclientgtk-3.0
Let those install with their normal dependencies and recommended packages—otherwise the SPICE graphical interface won’t function correctly.
Anyway, remember that --no-install-recommends trick—it’ll definitely come in handy someday!