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

Starting, stopping, and deleting KVM instances with Python


In this recipe we are going to use the create() method on the instance object we defined in the previous recipe to start it and the destroy() method to stop it.

To obtain more information on the create() method, run:

In [1]: instance.create?
Type: instancemethod
String Form:<bound method virDomain.create of <libvirt.virDomain object at 0x7fc5d9b97d90>>
File: /root/kvm_python/lib/python2.7/site-packages/libvirt.py
Definition: instance.create(self)
Docstring:
Launch a defined domain. If the call succeeds the domain moves from the
defined to the running domains pools. The domain will be paused only
if restoring from managed state created from a paused domain. For more
control, see virDomainCreateWithFlags().

In [2]:

Getting ready

For this recipe we are going to need the following:

  • An Ubuntu host, with libvirt and QEMU installed and configured
  • The debian.img raw image file we built in the Installing custom OS on the image with...