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

Introduction to the Kimchi project


Kimchi is an HTML5-based management tool for KVM. Among the various tools listed on http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/Management_Tools, to manage KVM infrastructure, Kimchi is simple to configure and use. The management console provided by Kimchi is feature-rich and cross browser and platform. It is also a perfect tool for any small organization that wants to create its own private cloud without investing considerable resources and money.

Note

The Kimchi project was started by Adam Litke and Anthony Liguori in 2012. The first community version (v0.1) was released in 2013. The current version is 1.5.0.

Kimchi is a lightweight and easy to install tool that gives you a great Web-based graphical interface for your KVM VMs very quickly, thus allowing you to control their life cycle (power on/off/resume) and access the display console over browser with no additional software installed. You can also create templates and use ISO images to create new virtual machines....