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

Converting virtual machines from unsupported virtualization platforms


If you have a virtual machine running on VirtualBox, Oracle VM, or any other unsupported virtualization platforms and wish to convert it to KVM then you have two options available.

The first option is to export the virtual machine from your virtualization platform to open virtualization format (ova). Copy this ova container to the virt-v2v conversion server and use ova as the input for the virt-v2v command:

#export pool=default
#virt-v2v -i ova -os $pool ovafile

This command will read the manifest bundled into the ova file, and create a virtual machine on the local standalone KVM host. The resulting disk image is stored in a libvirt storage pool, named default.

The second option is to consider the virtual machine as a physical system and use virt-p2v method to convert it.

Now you may have a question, how virt-v2v identify the guest operating system?

virt-v2v uses the virt-inspector utility to inspect the actual OS inside...