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

Creating a new VM using virt-manager

virt-manager (a GUI tool for managing VMs) and virt-install (a command-line utility for managing VMs) are two of the most commonly used utilities in Kernel-based VM (KVM) virtualization. By using them, we can do practically everything to our VMs—create, start, stop, delete, and much more. We already had a chance to work with these two utilities in previous chapters, but we need to take a more structured approach to the subject as they offer loads of additional options that we haven't have a chance to discuss yet. We'll also add some other utilities that are a part of the virt-* command stack that are very, very useful.

Let's start with virt-manager and its familiar GUI.

Using virt-manager

virt-manager is the go-to GUI utility to manage KVM VMs. It's very intuitive and easy to use, albeit lacking in functionality a bit, as we will describe a bit later. This is the main virt-manager window:

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