Added COPYING and README files.

[virt-mem.git] / README

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+virt-mem tools
+Copyright (C) 2008 Red Hat Inc.
+----------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+These are a collection of monitoring and management tools for virtual
+machines.
+
+Commands we support at the moment include:
+
+  virt-uname      'uname' command, shows OS version, architecture, etc.
+  virt-dmesg      'dmesg' command, shows kernel messages
+  virt-ps         'ps' command, shows process list
+
+The general idea is that they allow you to monitor virtual machines
+without needing to log in to the machine itself or install any extra
+software inside the virtual machine.  At the moment we only support
+virtual machines running Linux kernel >= 2.6, but we expect to support
+other operating systems in the future.
+
+Most of the commands also offer a CSV (comma-separated values) output
+format ('virt-xx --csv'), allowing usage from scripts to update
+spreadsheets, databases or integrate with existing monitoring systems
+like Nagios.
+
+The commands use libvirt to access the underlying virtualization
+system, so we support a variety of different systems such as Xen, QEMU
+and KVM, and more can be added just by adding support to libvirt.
+
+
+Website
+----------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-mem/
+
+We supply the latest source and binaries at the above site.
+
+
+Building from source
+----------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+Run ./configure and look at the output for any missing packages.
+
+Then:
+
+  make
+  make -C po     # if you want to rebuild the locales
+
+The binaries are called things like 'virt-dmesg.opt' and located in
+the respective directories, so you could run them by doing:
+
+  dmesg/virt-dmesg.opt
+
+All the binaries understand the --help option to provide a summary of
+options.  All require virtual machines to run against, but most also
+offer a test mode (-t option).
+
+To install the binaries, man pages and locales, do this as root:
+
+  make install
+  make -C po install
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