Attach or Remove VM Host Devices
Using the VM [name] page, Cockpit administrators can add host devices or remove them on a VM instance.
Host devices are physical devices connected to the managed host system, such as:
- SCSI tape drives, disks, and changers
- PCI NICs, GPUs, and HBAs
- USB mice, cameras, and disks
What Do You Need?
- The Cockpit web console must be installed and accessible.
For details, see these topics: Install and Enable Cockpit and Log in to the Cockpit Web Console.
- The Cockpit-machines add-on application must be installed in the web console and the
Oracle Linux virtualization packages must be installed and enabled on the host system.
For more information, see Install Cockpit-Machines and Enable Virtualization.
- One or more virtual machine instances exist on the managed host system and appear in the Virtual machines page.
- The host device is directly attached and operational on the managed host system.
Steps
Using the Cockpit web console, follow these steps to add or remove a VM host device.
- In the Cockpit navigation pane, click Virtual machines.
The Virtual machines page appears.
- In the Virtual machines page, click the name of the virtual
machine of interest.
The Virtual machines [VM name] page appears.
-
In Virtual machines [VM name] page, navigate to the Host devices section and perform any of the following actions:
Add host device Perform these steps: - Click Add host device.
- In the Add dialog, configure the following
properties.
- Type: Select USB or PCI to populate the Device product list.
- Device: Select the check box for the host device you want to add.
- Click Add. The host device appears in the Host devices section.
- Restart the VM instance to detect the newly added host device.
For details, see Start, Shutdown, Remove, or Interrupt a VM Instance.
Upon restarting the VM, the newly added device appears in the Host devices section of the VM instance page.
Remove Optional Requirement: - Before detaching a host device, consider using the
virsh dumpxml
command to create a backup of the VM XML configuration file:virsh dumpxml VM_name > VM_name.xml cat VM_name.xml <domain type='kvm' xmlns:qemu='http://libvirt.org/schemas/domain/qemu/1.0'> <name>VM_name</name> <uuid>ede29304-fe0c-4ca4-abcd-d246481acd18</uuid> [...]
Perform these steps:
- Click Remove.
- In the confirmation dialog, click Remove to detach the host device from the VM instance.
- If removing a host device causes the VM instance to become unbootable, use
the
virsh define
utility to restore the backed up XML configuration.virsh define VM_name.xml
- The removal of an attached USB host device might fail because of an
incorrect correlation between the device and bus numbers of the USB device.
As a workaround, edit VM’s XML configuration file to remove the USB device
entry [hostdev]. For example:
virsh edit VM_name_xml_file