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

VirtIO


In the virtualization world, a comparison is always made with bare-metal systems. Paravirtualized drivers enhance the performance of guests and try to retain near-bare-metal performance. It is recommended to use paravirtualized drivers for fully virtualized guests, especially when the guest is running with I/O-heavy tasks and applications. Virtio is an API for virtual IO and was developed by Rusty Russell in support of his own virtualization solution, called lguest. Virtio was introduced to achieve a common framework for hypervisors for IO virtualization.

In short, when we use paravirtualized drivers, the guest operating system is aware that it's running on a hypervisor and includes drivers that act as the front end. The front end drivers are part of the guest system. When there are emulated devices and someone wants to implement backend drivers for these devices, hypervisors do this job. The frontend and backend drivers communicate through a path that is nothing but virtio. KVM uses...