A web application for monitoring and controlling a small cluster of QEMU virtual machines. Allows for monitoring the state of virtual machines, rebooting them remotely and accessing their console via VNC.

Virtual machines prove useful for various development tasks. At XLAB, we often use QEMU based virtual machines for Linux kernel development and testing, as these activities often crash the very kernel and hence render the machine useless. Simply restarting a virtual machine running on a stable host proves much less time consuming than restarting a physical machine.

However, as kernel crashes render the network access useless, simple ssh or telnet connections do not prove adequate: access to the console itself is necessary. We run our virtual machines on headless hosts of our test cluster and exporting their consoles as X-windows clutters the desktop and limits the access to a single client only.

Fortunately, QEMU allows the console to be exported as a VNC server, and therefore we have developed a small web application for Apache Tomcat 5, that shows the list of all running virtual machines, monitors their state and enables the user to reboot them remotely and access their consoles by means of a VNC applet embedded in the browser itself.

Detailed instructions on prerequisites for running QWebMon, building and installing it are included in the source distribution itself. The code is licensed according to GPL v2.