Console access via virsh console for Ubuntu guest VMs

Sometimes it’s a hassle to open up virt-manager for just running a quick command on a guest VM. Luckily, virsh has the console command to attach to the serial console of a guest. But because the serial console is not by default enabled on Ubuntu Server (at least, not as far as I know), you have to enable it manually.

For this, I created a small ttys0.service file:

[Unit]
Description=Serial Console Service

[Service]
ExecStart=/sbin/getty -L 115200 ttyS0 screen-256color
Restart=always

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Install the service, load it with systemctl daemon-reload, and be sure to enable it so that it automatically starts after boot. And that’s it! Now you can easily access the console of your guest VM using virsh console.