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 virt-install


virt-install is an interactive command-line tool that can be used to set up the guest and then start the installation process.

Execute the virt-install command as root to begin. There are many options available with virt-install that can be passed as arguments to configure the installation to meet your virtual machine creation requirements. virt-install is a scripting-friendly command. It can be easily embedded in scripts to automate virtual machine creation.

Installing a Windows 7 Guest using the virt-install command

Before starting the operating system installation using the virt-install command, it is necessary to have a virtual disk created. To create a virtual disk, use the qemu-img command:

  1. Create a virtual disk of the desired size. Here for example, we will create a 20 GB disk with the raw disk format:

    qemu-img create -f raw -o size=10G /var/lib/libvirt/qemu/win7.img
    
  2. Then start virt-install by running the following command:

    virt-install \
    --name Win7 \
    --ram...