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 the VNC display protocol

When the VNC graphics server is enabled through libvirt, QEMU will redirect the graphics output to its inbuilt VNC server implementation. The VNC server will listen to a network port where the VNC clients can connect.

The following screenshot shows how to add a VNC graphics server. Just go to Virtual Machine Manager, open the settings of your virtual machine, and go to the Display Spice tab on the left-hand side:

Figure 6.12 – VNC configuration for a KVM virtual machine

When adding VNC graphics, you will be presented with the options shown in the preceding screenshot:

  • Type: The type of the graphics server. Here, it is VNC server.
  • Address: VNC server listening address. It can be all, localhost, or an IP address. By default, it is Localhost only.
  • Port: VNC server listening port. You can either choose auto, where libvirt defines the port based on the availability, or you can define one yourself. Make sure...