Book Image

Mastering KVM Virtualization - Second Edition

By : Vedran Dakic, Humble Devassy Chirammal, Prasad Mukhedkar, Anil Vettathu
5 (1)
Book Image

Mastering KVM Virtualization - Second Edition

5 (1)
By: Vedran Dakic, Humble Devassy Chirammal, Prasad Mukhedkar, Anil Vettathu

Overview of this book

Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) enables you to virtualize your data center by transforming your Linux operating system into a powerful hypervisor that allows you to manage multiple operating systems with minimal fuss. With this book, you'll gain insights into configuring, troubleshooting, and fixing bugs in KVM virtualization and related software. This second edition of Mastering KVM Virtualization is updated to cover the latest developments in the core KVM components - libvirt and QEMU. Starting with the basics of Linux virtualization, you'll explore VM lifecycle management and migration techniques. You’ll then learn how to use SPICE and VNC protocols while creating VMs and discover best practices for using snapshots. As you progress, you'll integrate third-party tools with Ansible for automation and orchestration. You’ll also learn to scale out and monitor your environments, and will cover oVirt, OpenStack, Eucalyptus, AWS, and ELK stack. Throughout the book, you’ll find out more about tools such as Cloud-Init and Cloudbase-Init. Finally, you'll be taken through the performance tuning and troubleshooting guidelines for KVM-based virtual machines and a hypervisor. By the end of this book, you'll be well-versed with KVM virtualization and the tools and technologies needed to build and manage diverse virtualization environments.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
1
Section 1: KVM Virtualization Basics
4
Section 2: libvirt and ovirt for Virtual Machine Management
11
Section 3: Automation, Customization, and Orchestration for KVM VMs
15
Section 4: Scalability, Monitoring, Performance Tuning, and Troubleshooting

Provisioning a virtual machine using the kvm_libvirt module

One thing that you may or may not include is a setting that defines how SSH is used to connect to machines Ansible is going to configure. Before we do that, we need to spend a bit of time talking about security and Ansible. Like almost all things related to Linux (or *nix in general), Ansible is not an integrated system, instead relying on different services that already exist. To connect to systems it manages and to execute commands, Ansible relies on SSH (in Linux) or other systems such as WinRM or PowerShell on Windows. We are going to focus on Linux here, but remember that quite a bit of information about Ansible is completely system-independent.

SSH is a simple but extremely robust protocol that allows us to transfer data (Secure FTP, SFTP, and so on) and execute commands (SSH) on remote hosts through a secure channel. Ansible uses SSH directly by connecting and then executing commands and transferring files. This...