Book Image

Mastering KVM Virtualization

Book Image

Mastering KVM Virtualization

Overview of this book

A robust datacenter is essential for any organization – but you don’t want to waste resources. With KVM you can virtualize your datacenter, transforming a Linux operating system into a powerful hypervisor that allows you to manage multiple OS with minimal fuss. This book doesn’t just show you how to virtualize with KVM – it shows you how to do it well. Written to make you an expert on KVM, you’ll learn to manage the three essential pillars of scalability, performance and security – as well as some useful integrations with cloud services such as OpenStack. From the fundamentals of setting up a standalone KVM virtualization platform, and the best tools to harness it effectively, including virt-manager, and kimchi-project, everything you do is built around making KVM work for you in the real-world, helping you to interact and customize it as you need it. With further guidance on performance optimization for Microsoft Windows and RHEL virtual machines, as well as proven strategies for backup and disaster recovery, you’ll can be confident that your virtualized data center is working for your organization – not hampering it. Finally, the book will empower you to unlock the full potential of cloud through KVM. Migrating your physical machines to the cloud can be challenging, but once you’ve mastered KVM, it’s a little easie.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Mastering KVM Virtualization
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Introducing oVirt


oVirt is a virtual data center manager. It manages virtual machines, hosts, storage, and virtualized networks. It provides a powerful web management interface. Virtual machines are managed using libvirt and vdsm (a host service that runs along with libvirt). The hypervisors use KVM to run the virtual machines.

Remember, just like KVM and SPICE, oVirt also came from Qumranet. It started as a closed source desktop virtualization manager developed on .NET and runs on Windows servers. When Red Hat acquired Qumranet, they open sourced the project and ported the code to Java and named the project as oVirt. oVirt is an upstream project for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV).

Note

oVirt is a huge product with hundreds of features. Covering them all in two chapters is not possible. What we did is, we identified the core features in oVirt and explained the backend. This should provide you with a strong basis in oVirt which will help you explore oVirt in detail.

oVirt is all about...