Libvirt is a library for management of virtualized
operating systems. Initially supporting the Xen
hypervisor, it provides a generic driver backend
to allow implementations for management of
arbitrary hypervisors (QEMU, UML, etc). The
library aims to provide a long term stable API to
isolate applications from instability in the APIs
of the underlying virtualization technology. The
core library API is written in C, with bindings
for Python and a command line tool for shell
scripting also provided. The library allows either
full read-write access to the hypervisor, or for
unprivileged use a secure read-only channel (eg
for monitoring).