Book Image

Mastering Proxmox - Third Edition

By : Wasim Ahmed
Book Image

Mastering Proxmox - Third Edition

By: Wasim Ahmed

Overview of this book

Proxmox is an open source server virtualization solution that has enterprise-class features for managing virtual machines, for storage, and to virtualize both Linux and Windows application workloads. You'll begin with a refresher on the advanced installation features and the Proxmox GUI to familiarize yourself with the Proxmox VE hypervisor. Then, you'll move on to explore Proxmox under the hood, focusing on storage systems, such as Ceph, used with Proxmox. Moving on, you'll learn to manage KVM virtual machines, deploy Linux containers fast, and see how networking is handled in Proxmox. You'll also learn how to protect a cluster or a VM with a firewall and explore the new high availability features introduced in Proxmox VE 5.0. Next, you'll dive deeper into the backup/restore strategy and see how to properly update and upgrade a Proxmox node. Later, you'll learn how to monitor a Proxmox cluster and all of its components using Zabbix. Finally, you'll discover how to recover Promox from disaster strikes through some real-world examples. By the end of the book, you'll be an expert at making Proxmox work in production environments with minimal downtime.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Exploring KVM


As the name implies, KVM is merely a virtualization process that adds the hypervisor ability to a Linux kernel. KVM allows you to create fully isolated virtual machines while not being dependent on the host operating system or kernel. The isolation is created by emulating several types of hardware, such as CPU, RAM, sound/video/network cards, PCI bridges, and input devices. In order to create KVM virtual machines, the CPU in the host node must have hardware virtualization extensions (HWE). KVM/Qemu creates a layer that virtualizes physical hardware, allowing full system virtualization and not kernel-level virtualization, as is the case with OpenVZ and LXC containers. This allows a wide range of operating systems to be virtualized, such as Linux, BSD, Windows, and macOS. One of the main differences between KVM and container-based virtual machines is that a KVM virtual system shares on the hardware level, whereas container-based virtualization shares on the kernel level. Thus...