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2. Qemu
Qemu19 is a machine emulator that can run operating systems and programs for one machine on a different machine. Mostly it is not used as emulator but as virtualizer in collaboration with KVM or XEN kernel components. In that case it utilizes the virtualization technology of the hardware to virtualize guests.
While qemu has a command line interface20 and a monitor21 to interact with running guests those is rarely used that way for other means than development purposes. Libvirt provides an abstraction from specific versions and hypervisors and encapsulates some workarounds and best practices.