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

How does virt-v2v work?


In order to convert a virtual machine from foreign hypervisors to run on KVM hypervisors, the virt-v2v utility performs the following steps:

  1. Retrieve guest configuration (xml) from the hypervisor

  2. Export a disk image

  3. Modify the disk image

  4. Create a guest on the target hypervisor

Note

virt-v2v connects to the target hypervisor using libvirt, retrieves the specified virtual machine configuration and disk path, and then transfers the disk image over the network to the conversion server. Next, we will modify this image to install a virtio driver (network and block). We will then update the guest operating system configuration to match the KVM environment that includes updating the /etc/fstab and xorg.conf file, rebuilding initrd, removing blkid.tab, and finally creating a guest on the target KVM host.

Getting the virt-v2v utility

The virt-v2v utility is shipped as an RPM package. The package is available in the Fedora base channel. To install it, we will use the dnf package manager...