What is Kimchi?
Kimchi is an HTML5 based management tool for KVM hypervisor. It is an open-source project started by Red Hat to provide a simple and intuitive web UI for administration of virtual machines and containers.
Some key features of Kimchi include:
- Easy to use graphical interface to manage VMs, templates, storage pools, networks without needing to use virsh commands
- Live migration of VMs from one host to another with minimal downtime
- Monitoring resource utilization like CPU, memory, disk of the guests
- Support for disk sharing between multiple guest VMs
- User management with permission controls
- Integration with Linux container (LXC) management
- Remote access using HTML5 compatible browsers
Kimchi aims to simplify management by providing an intuitive way to do common tasks like installing new VMs from templates, configuring storage and networks, starting/stopping VMs without needing deep Linux/KVM knowledge.
It can be a useful alternative for small environments where the advanced features and scalability of OpenStack or oVirt may not be needed. The browser-based access also makes Kimchi easy to access remotely. It offers an accessible solution for basic VM/container life cycle management and monitoring.