Book Image

KVM Virtualization Cookbook

Book Image

KVM Virtualization Cookbook

Overview of this book

Virtualization technologies such as KVM allow for better control over the available server resources, by deploying multiple virtual instances on the same physical host, or clusters of compute resources. With KVM it is possible to run various workloads in isolation with the hypervisor layer providing better tenant isolation and higher degree of security. This book will provide a deep dive into deploying KVM virtual machines using qemu and libvirt and will demonstrate practical examples on how to run, scale, monitor, migrate and backup such instances. You will also discover real production ready recipes on deploying KVM instances with OpenStack and how to programatically manage the life cycle of KVM virtual machines using Python. You will learn numerous tips and techniques which will help you deploy & plan the KVM infrastructure. Next, you will be introduced to the working of libvirt libraries and the iPython development environment. Finally, you will be able to tune your Linux kernel for high throughput and better performance. By the end of this book, you will gain all the knowledge needed to be an expert in working with the KVM virtualization infrastructure.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Installing and configuring libvirt


In this recipe, we are going to install libvirt from packages provided by the Linux distribution of choice and see what configuration files and options are available for configuring it. As with any other production-ready tools, we recommend using packages for your production environment for ease and consistency of deployment; however, compiling the latest version from the source is also an option if the packages from your Linux vendor are older.

Getting ready

Depending on your Linux distribution, the package name and installation commands will differ. You can use your system's package manager, such as apt, dnf, or yum to search for any packages containing the libvirt string and get familiar with what is available for your particular Linux variant. The source code can be downloaded from the official libvirt project website at http://www.qemu-project.org/download/#source.

How to do it...

To install libvirt from packages and source follow the following steps:

  1. On...