Ytdyklly

I'm having an issue with viewing output from a virtual machine installed via virt-install.

I first used this method, but it left me with the following immediately after running:

Starting install...

Connected to domain ApacheServer

Escape character is ^]

It sits here forever and no input is accepted into the terminal at this point. After some googling around the web, I ended up destroying/deleting my guest, and starting over with the install, but this time, I had added
--console pty,target_type=serial to the arguments being passed to virt-install. For some clarity, below is the complete install command I used last:

virt-install 

-n ApacheServer 

--description "CENTOS7 for Apache Server" 

--os-type=Linux 

--os-variant=rhel6 

--ram=2048 

--vcpus=1 

--disk path=/var/lib/libvirt/images/CentOS7-Apache.img,bus=virtio,size=10 

--graphics none 

--console pty,target_type=serial 

--cdrom /home/server/Downloads/CentOS-7-x86_64-Minimal-1810.iso 

--network bridge:virbr0

This doesn't change anything for me. I am still stuck at Escape character is ^] after the install. I even closed this console window out, and tried to get into the guest via $ virsh console ApacheServer. This leaves me with:

Connected to domain ApacheServer

Escape character is ^]

error: operation failed: Active console session exists for this domain

My current expectation is that after the install, or after issuing the virsh console <domain name> command, I should see the console/terminal output that the guest is putting out.

So, it turns out that specifying your boot device with --cdrom /path/to/bootmedia.iso can be problematic when it comes to viewing output during boot up. Trying to install again, I noticed this warning pop up before the Starting install... text:

WARNING CDROM media does not print to the text console by default, so
you likely will not see text install output. You might want to use
--location. See the man page for examples of using --location with CDROM media

I searched for this warning and found suggestions for adding the following to the virt-install args:
--location /path/to/bootmedia.iso en lieu of --cdrom
and --extra-args console=ttyS0.

After making these two changes, everything worked. The complete working install command is as follows:

virt-install 

-n ApacheServer 

--description "CENTOS7 for Apache Server" 

--os-type=Linux 

--os-variant=rhel6 

--ram=2048 

--vcpus=1 

--disk path=/var/lib/libvirt/images/CentOS7-Apache.img,bus=virtio,size=10 

--graphics none 

--console pty,target_type=serial 

--location /home/server/Downloads/CentOS-7-x86_64-Minimal-1810.iso 

--network bridge:virbr0 

--extra-args console=ttyS0