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)

Inspecting snapshots


In this short recipe, we are going to see examples on how to obtain more information on existing virtual machine snapshots.

Getting ready

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

  • A libvirt host with the QEMU toolset
  • The snapshots we created in the Creating snapshots recipe

How to do it...

To inspect a snapshot, run the following commands:

  1. List all available snapshots for the specified KVM instance:
root@kvm:~# virsh snapshot-list kvm1
 Name                Creation Time              State
------------------------------------------------------------
 1492797458          2017-04-21 17:57:38 +0000  running
 kvm1_ext_snapshot   2017-04-21 18:08:49 +0000  disk-snapshot

root@kvm:~#
  1. Get information about the running snapshot:
root@kvm:~# virsh snapshot-info kvm1 --snapshotname 1492797458
Name: 1492797458
Domain: kvm1
Current: no
State: running
Location: internal
Parent: -
Children: 1
Descendants: 1
Metadata: yes

root@kvm:~#
  1. Get information about the disk snapshot:
root@kvm...