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 4. Getting Started with libvirt and Creating Your First Virtual Machines

In Chapter 3, Setting Up Standalone KVM Virtualization, you installed and started the libvirtd services. You were also introduced to the libvirt tools virt-manager and virsh, which help you manage virtual machines.

New users always prefer the GUI rather than text-based commands. Hence we are starting with virt-manager. We also think understanding virt-manager will fast-forward the learning process of managing virtual machines using libvirt and later with virsh. Whenever possible we will present you with the equivalent virsh command so that you can try and learn both virt-manager and virsh.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • All about virt-manager

  • Default virtual storage and network configurations

  • Various guest installations methods (PXE/ISO/NETWORK/IMPORT)

  • Using the virt-builder and oz utilities to rapidly create multiple VMs