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)

Manual offline migration using an iSCSI storage pool


In this recipe, we are going to set up an iSCSI target, configure a storage pool for it, and create a new KVM instance using the attached iSCSI block device as its backend volume. Then, we are going to perform a manual offline migration of the instance to a new host.

Getting ready

For this recipe, we are going to need the following:

  • Two servers with libvirt and qemu installed and configured, named kvm1 and kvm2. The two hosts must be able to connect to each other using SSH keys and short hostname.
  • A server with an available block device that will be exported as an iSCSI target and reachable from both libvirt servers. If a block device is not available, please refer to the There's more... section in this recipe for instructions on how to create one using a regular file. The name of the iSCSI target server in this recipe is iscsi_target.
  • Connectivity to a Linux repository to install the guest OS.

How to do it...

To perform a manual offline migration...