=============
Virtualbricks
=============

Virtualbricks is a frontend for the management of Qemu Virtual Machines
(VMs) and VDE virtualized network devices (switches, channel emulators,
etc.). Although it can be used to manage isolated VMs, its peculiar aim
is to design and manage testbeds consisting of many VMs interconnected
by VDE elements. In other words, it allows to extend the concept of VM
to testbeds, which thanks to Virtualbricks can become entirely
software-defined.

Installation
============

Virtualbricks is installable with pip but it won't work. It depends
indeed on pygtk which is not installable via pip. The first solution is
to install pygtk from your distribution's packages and to install
Virtualbricks with pip::

   pip install --user .

The second solution is to install Virtualbricks from the DEB or RPM
packages. Available soon.

Note also that if you install Virtualbricks with pip, you must be able
to install the dependencies, most notably pygraphviz. Pygraphviz
requires a compiler, pkg-config and the development libraries for
graphviz (libgraphviz-dev in Debian).

Setup
============
Before using virtualbricks directly you'll probably need to change some
default env paths in the configuration file, that is usually placed in 
`~/.virtualbricks.conf`.
Remember to set `qemupath` and `vdepath` to your corresponding binaries
path, as well as activating `kvm` and `ksm` if you are using them.

If you prefer using pkexec instead of the default gksu (now
deprecated), change the corresponding line in `~/.virtualbricks.conf`.