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

NFS storage pool

As a protocol, NFS has been around since the mid-80s. It was originally developed by Sun Microsystems as a protocol for sharing files, which is what it's been used for up to this day. Actually, it's still being developed, which is quite surprising for a technology that's so old. For example, NFS version 4.2 came out in 2016. In this version, NFS received a very big update, such as the following:

  • Server-side copy: A feature that significantly enhances the speed of cloning operations between NFS servers by carrying out cloning directly between NFS servers
  • Sparse files and space reservation: Features that enhance the way NFS works with files that have unallocated blocks, while keeping an eye on capacity so that we can guarantee space availability when we need to write data
  • Application data block support: A feature that helps applications that work with files as block devices (disks)
  • Better pNFS implementation

There are other bits...