Book Image

KVM Virtualization Cookbook

By : Konstantin Ivanov
Book Image

KVM Virtualization Cookbook

By: Konstantin Ivanov

Overview of this book

Virtualization technologies such as KVM allow for better control over the available server resources, by deploying multiple virtual instances on the same physical host, or clusters of compute resources. With KVM it is possible to run various workloads in isolation with the hypervisor layer providing better tenant isolation and higher degree of security. This book will provide a deep dive into deploying KVM virtual machines using qemu and libvirt and will demonstrate practical examples on how to run, scale, monitor, migrate and backup such instances. You will also discover real production ready recipes on deploying KVM instances with OpenStack and how to programatically manage the life cycle of KVM virtual machines using Python. You will learn numerous tips and techniques which will help you deploy & plan the KVM infrastructure. Next, you will be introduced to the working of libvirt libraries and the iPython development environment. Finally, you will be able to tune your Linux kernel for high throughput and better performance. By the end of this book, you will gain all the knowledge needed to be an expert in working with the KVM virtualization infrastructure.
Table of Contents (9 chapters)

The Open vSwitch

OVS is another software bridging/switching device that can be used to create various virtual network topologies and connect KVM instances to it. OVS can be used instead of the Linux bridge, and it provides an extensive feature set, including policy routing, Access Control Lists (ACLs), Quality of Service (QoS) policing, traffic monitoring, flow management, VLAN tagging, GRE tunneling, and much more.

In this recipe, we are going to install, configure, and use the OVS bridge to connect a KVM instance to the host OS, in a similar way to what we did in the previous recipe with the Linux bridge.

Getting ready

In order for this recipe to work, we need to ensure the following:

  • The Linux bridge is deleted, if present...