Book Image

Mastering KVM Virtualization

Book Image

Mastering KVM Virtualization

Overview of this book

A robust datacenter is essential for any organization – but you don’t want to waste resources. With KVM you can virtualize your datacenter, transforming a Linux operating system into a powerful hypervisor that allows you to manage multiple OS with minimal fuss. This book doesn’t just show you how to virtualize with KVM – it shows you how to do it well. Written to make you an expert on KVM, you’ll learn to manage the three essential pillars of scalability, performance and security – as well as some useful integrations with cloud services such as OpenStack. From the fundamentals of setting up a standalone KVM virtualization platform, and the best tools to harness it effectively, including virt-manager, and kimchi-project, everything you do is built around making KVM work for you in the real-world, helping you to interact and customize it as you need it. With further guidance on performance optimization for Microsoft Windows and RHEL virtual machines, as well as proven strategies for backup and disaster recovery, you’ll can be confident that your virtualized data center is working for your organization – not hampering it. Finally, the book will empower you to unlock the full potential of cloud through KVM. Migrating your physical machines to the cloud can be challenging, but once you’ve mastered KVM, it’s a little easie.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Mastering KVM Virtualization
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Introducing virtual machine templates


A virtual machine template (more commonly referred to as simply a template) is a pre-configured operating system image that can used to quickly deploy virtual machines. Using templates, you can avoid many repetitive installation and configuration tasks. The result is a fully installed, ready to operate (virtual) server in less time than manual installation would take.

Consider this example; suppose you wish to create four Apache web servers to host your web applications. Normally, with the traditional manual installation method, you would first have to create four virtual machines with specific hardware configurations, install an operating system on each of them one by one, and then download and install the required apache packages using yum or some other software installation method. This is a time-consuming job as you will be mostly doing repetitive work but with a template approach. However, it can be done in considerably less time. How? Because you...