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 3. Setting Up Standalone KVM Virtualization

In the second chapter, you learned about KVM internals; now in this chapter, you will learn about how to set up your Linux server as a virtualization host. We are talking about using KVM for virtualization and libvirt as the virtualization management engine.

KVM enables virtualization and readies your server or workstation to host the virtual machines. In technical terms, KVM is a set of kernel modules for an x86 architecture hardware with virtualization extensions; when loaded, it converts a Linux server into a virtualization server (hypervisor). The loadable modules are kvm.ko, which provides the core virtualization capabilities and a processor-specific module, kvm-intel.ko or kvm-amd.ko.

Note

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypervisor. A hypervisor or virtual machine monitor (VMM) is a piece of computer software, firmware, or hardware that creates and runs virtual machines.

It is not enough to just load the KVM kernel modules...