I'm sure many of you have already used a virtualization solution before. In fact, I bet a great deal of readers are following along with this book while using a virtual machine running within a solution such as VirtualBox, Parallels, VMware, or one of the others. In this section, we'll see how to use an Ubuntu Server in place of those solutions. While there's certainly nothing wrong with solutions such as VirtualBox, Ubuntu has virtualization built right in, in the form of Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM). KVM offers a very fast interface to the Linux kernel to run your virtual machines with near-native speeds, depending on your use case.
I bet you're eager to get started, but there are a few quick things to consider before we dive in. First, of all the activities I've walked you through in this book so far, setting up our own virtualization solution will be the most expensive from a hardware perspective. The more virtual machines you plan on running...