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

Building new KVM instances with virt-install and using the console


In the Connecting to the running instance with VNC recipe from Chapter 1, Getting Started with QEMU and KVM, you learned how to connect to a QEMU/KVM virtual machine that was running a VNC server. This is a great way to connect to an instance that is being installed or in the process of booting in order to interact with it.

So far, we've used the custom raw image that we created earlier, which contains an installation of Debian. Recall from Chapter 1, Getting Started with QEMU and KVM, that we used the debootstrap command to install the OS inside the image file. In this recipe, we are going to use the virt-install tool to install a new Linux distribution, using the provided upstream Internet repository, as the source of the installation and then use the virsh command to attach to the running instance, using the console.

Getting ready

For this recipe, we are going to need the following:

  • The virsh command
  • The virt-install command...