OpenStack is and has been one of the hottest projects in cloud computing for 5 years running. OpenStack provides an open source software platform for creating and managing public and private Infrastructure As A Service for new scale out-based workload. There are various independent components/projects in OpenStack that work together to build highly scalable cloud infrastructures.
OpenStack Compute (Nova) is one of the core components of OpenStack and provides computing power to run cloud workloads. Nova itself is not virtualization software but it is a framework that supports multiple hypervisors including those from VMware, Citrix, and Microsoft, to name a few. To date, however, OpenStack's strength lies in KVM. Various surveys (such as OpenStack Superuser [1]) clearly show that the majority of OpenStack deployments, at nearly 90 percent, are based on KVM and this book's aim is to touch on all the aspects of KVM virtualization...