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

Managing Open vSwitch using the OpenDaylight SDN controller


Till now we have seen how Open vSwitch works in normal mode. In normal mode, Open vSwitch works just like a typical L2 learning switch with an option to manipulate the flow using the ofctl command. While this approach offers features such as tunneling, QoS, Overlay, and SPAN natively, the real value comes from being able to directly influence flow tables, creating a powerful L2-L4 service insertion in the Open vSwitch data plane to bring programmability to otherwise inflexible networks.

By connecting an Open vSwitch to an SDN controller, we get the level of abstraction and automation required to revolutionize networking. It essentially turns OVS into an access layer to the virtual environment, taking instructions from the centralized controller that pushes flows down to the vSwitch. The following diagram represents the high-level architecture of Open vSwitch integration with a SDN controller:

This diagram can be broken down into three...