Ubuntu server gives you various options for your virtualization needs. You can choose from KVM, XEN, QEMU, VirtualBox, and various other proprietary and open source tools. KVM, or Kernel virtual machine, is the default hypervisor on Ubuntu. In this recipe, we will set up a virtual machine with the help of KVM. Ubuntu, being a popular cloud distribution provides prebuilt cloud images that can be used to start virtual machines in the cloud. We will use one of these prebuilt images to build our own local virtual machine.
As always, you will need access to the root account or an account with sudo
privileges.
Follows these steps to install KVM and launch a virtual machine using cloud image: