Chapter 1, Getting Started with QEMU and KVM, provides recipes for installing and configuring QEMU, creating and managing disk images, and running virtual machines with the qemu-system utility.

Chapter 2, Using libvirt to Manage KVM, covers everything that is needed to install, configure, and run KVM instances using libvirt. You will learn what packages and tools are required, along with different ways of configuring virtual machines using XML definition files. By the end of this chapter, you will have a Linux system with running KVM instances.

Chapter 3, KVM Networking with libvirt, will present recipes for working with the Linux Bridge and Open vSwitch and will demonstrate how to connect KVM instances using NAT, bridged, and PCI pass-through networking.

Chapter 4, Migrating KVM Instances, will show examples on how to perform offline and online migration of running KVM virtual machines.

Chapter 5, Monitoring and Backup of KVM Virtual Machines, will present examples on how to deploy complete monitoring systems with Sensu and Uchiwa and demonstrate how to create snapshots to use as backups.

Chapter 6, Deploying KVM Instances with OpenStack, demonstrates how to provision KVM instances with OpenStack. It begins by introducing the various components that make OpenStack and how to use the LXC Nova driver to automatically provision virtual machines.

Chapter 7, Using Python to Build and Manage KVM Instances, will present recipes for building, starting, and managing the lifecycle of KVM instances using the Python libvirt library. We will also see examples on how to build a simple RESTful API to work with KVM.

Chapter 8, Kernel Tuning for KVM Performance, shows recipes for tuning the host OS for better I/O, CPU, memory, and network utilization. The presented examples can also be used inside the KVM instances, depending on their workload.

A beginner-level knowledge of Linux and the command line is required to follow along and run the recipes. Some Python experience is required to fully understand and be able to run the examples in Chapter 7, Using Python to Build and Manage KVM Instances.

Most recipes in this book have been tested on bare metal servers with processors supporting virtualization and the latest version of Ubuntu Linux.

This book is for anyone who is curious about virtualization with KVM--from Linux administrators who are looking for in-depth understanding of how KVM can be deployed and managed in large scale production environments to software developers that need a quick and easy way to prototype code in isolated guests. A DevOps engineer is most likely the best job title for those who want to read the book from cover to cover and try all examples.

In this book, you will find several headings that appear frequently (Getting ready, How to do it, How it works, There's more, and See also).

To give clear instructions on how to complete a recipe, we use these sections as follows:

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows:" Managing disk images withqemu-img."

A block of code is set as follows:

import libvirt
from bottle import run, request, get, post, HTTPResponse
def libvirtConnect():
try:
conn = libvirt.open('qemu:///system')
except libvirt.libvirtError:
conn = None
return conn

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

root@kvm:~# apt-get update

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Thememory_checkfor the KVM instance is now showing in the Uchiwa dashboard."

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