How it works...

In step 1, we list all defined instances, regardless of their state. From the output, we can see that we currently have one instance that we defined in the earlier recipe.

In step 2, we started the virtual machine and ensured its status had changed to running.

If you completed the Running Virtual Machines with qemu-system-* recipe from Chapter 1, Getting Started with QEMU and KVM, you might note that the XML definition for this VM is very similar to all the command-line options we used to start the QEMU instance. We can see the similarities of how the new instance was started  in step 3. The main difference is the larger number of parameters that libvirt passed to the QEMU executable. 

Finally, in steps 4 and 5, we stopped the VM and removed its definition file. The raw image we used for the VM is still available however and can be used again.