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

Migrating VMs

In simple terms, migration enables you to move your VM from one physical machine to another physical machine, with a very minimal downtime or no downtime. We can also move VM storage, which is a resource-hog type of operation that needs to be carefully planned and—if possible —executed after hours so that it doesn't affect other VMs' performance as much as it could.

There are various different types of migration, as follows:

  • Offline (cold)
  • Online (live)
  • Suspended migration

There are also various different types of online migrations, depending on what you're moving, as follows:

  • The compute part of the VM (moving the VM from one KVM host to another KVM host)
  • The storage part of the VM (moving VM files from one storage pool to another storage pool)
  • Both (moving the VM from host to host and storage pool to storage pool at the same time)

There are some differences in terms of which migration scenarios...