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

Using virtual machine display devices

To make the graphics work on virtual machines, QEMU needs to provide two components to its virtual machines: a virtual graphic adapter and a method or protocol to access the graphics from the client. Let's discuss these two concepts, starting with a virtual graphic adapter. The latest version of QEMU has eight different types of virtual/emulated graphics adapters. All of these have some similarities and differences, all of which can be in terms of features and/or resolutions supported or other, more technical details. So, let's describe them and see which use cases we are going to favor a specific virtual graphic card for:

  • tcx: A SUN TCX virtual graphics card that can be used with old SUN OSes.
  • cirrus: A virtual graphic card that's based on an old Cirrus Logic GD5446 VGA chip. It can be used with any guest OS after Windows 95.
  • std: A standard VGA card that can be used with high-resolution modes for guest OSes after...