Libvirt is a virtualization API and management tool that allows programmatic control over virtual machines and hypervisors. It provides a common API that works across multiple hypervisor platforms to control virtualization lifecycles including defining, starting, stopping, and deleting virtual machines. The document discusses using libvirt and its command line tool virsh to manage VMs, the libvirt API, and some examples of using the Python bindings to perform basic VM operations like attaching and detaching disks. It also covers some issues with libvirt like unstable VM status detection on Xen and techniques for debugging and logging.