Book Image

Mastering KVM Virtualization

Book Image

Mastering KVM Virtualization

Overview of this book

A robust datacenter is essential for any organization – but you don’t want to waste resources. With KVM you can virtualize your datacenter, transforming a Linux operating system into a powerful hypervisor that allows you to manage multiple OS with minimal fuss. This book doesn’t just show you how to virtualize with KVM – it shows you how to do it well. Written to make you an expert on KVM, you’ll learn to manage the three essential pillars of scalability, performance and security – as well as some useful integrations with cloud services such as OpenStack. From the fundamentals of setting up a standalone KVM virtualization platform, and the best tools to harness it effectively, including virt-manager, and kimchi-project, everything you do is built around making KVM work for you in the real-world, helping you to interact and customize it as you need it. With further guidance on performance optimization for Microsoft Windows and RHEL virtual machines, as well as proven strategies for backup and disaster recovery, you’ll can be confident that your virtualized data center is working for your organization – not hampering it. Finally, the book will empower you to unlock the full potential of cloud through KVM. Migrating your physical machines to the cloud can be challenging, but once you’ve mastered KVM, it’s a little easie.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Mastering KVM Virtualization
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Chapter 13. Performance Tuning and Best Practices in KVM

In this chapter, we will see how performance tuning can be done on a KVM setup. We will also discuss the best practices that can be applied in a KVM setup to improve performance. We have included steps to tune different components such as CPUs, memory, networking, blocks and time keeping.

Performance tuning is a trial-and-error process. Virtual machines host different type of applications and hence the type of tuning required varies with virtual machines. In most cases default configuration is enough to get a decent performance. Before performance tuning we should understand all the components involved, the options available and the subsystems. Then we can start implementing the options, gather the results, and finally come to a conclusion. It is not possible to grab and fix in the performance world. It has to be done by a trial-and-error method. Either your setup is bare-metal or virtualized. One common way to improve performance is...