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 5. Network and Storage

In the world of virtualization, networking and storage can be put into two categories:

  • Physical: A network and storage infrastructure that is built with the help of a host system to provide networking and storage needs for the virtual machines. In the case of networking, this includes layer 3 and 2 components of the network, software bridge, iptables rules, and so on. In the case of storage, this includes storage devices to provide storage to hypervisor (SAN, ISCSI, and so on), LVM, different file systems, NFS, and so on.

  • Virtual: A network and storage infrastructure, which is created with the help of virtualization software; it includes both emulated and paravirtualized network and storage devices created inside the VM and the virtual devices created on the host to provide network a connectivity and storage to the VMs.

When you imagine your virtualization infrastructure in these terms, it is easy to understand the whole setup. This approach is also good when...