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)

Introduction


It goes without saying that monitoring and backing up of production KVM instances is important in order to meet uptime Service-Level Agreements (SLAs) and to satisfy high-availability and performance requirements. Monitoring and backing up of virtual machines is not very different from monitoring and backing up of physical servers. In some cases, it's even more convenient to back up a single image file for VM or create a snapshot, rather than the filesystem of an OS running on a physical server.

In this chapter, we are going to see examples on how to gather resource usage metrics for live KVM instances and how to monitor the resource usage and alert on predefined thresholds with tools such as Sensu. Following this, we are going to focus on different ways of backing up KVM guests using tools such as rsync, and creating and managing snapshots with the help of the virsh command.