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

It's all about storage!


Similar to virtual network infrastructure, we need a storage backend to create and save the virtual disks. There is an option to choose a wide variety of storage solution is as backend for virtual machines, from normal file-based storage to logical volume managed storage, gluster container, and many more. Storage backend is created and managed using the libvirt storage API and is called a "storage pool".

In this section, you will learn how to work with unmanaged and managed storage. You will also see how to create storage pools and volumes, including some of the newer options, such as ceph block storage, which allows us to create really large sized virtual disks and attach them to a virtual machine. You will also learn how to attach multiple disks to a single VM.

Working with unmanaged storage

Storage, which is not directly controlled and monitored by libvirt, is still used with virtual machines and is called unmanaged storage. This means that you can straightforwardly...