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 6. Virtual Machine Lifecycle Management

In the previous chapters, we have covered some of the main operations on a virtual machine. You have learned the steps to create a virtual machine. In this chapter, we are going to cover the major tasks associated with a system administrator to manage a virtual machine, including offline and live migration of a virtual machine. You might see some commands revisited or repeated from the previous chapters. You need a Fedora 22 virtual machine ready to follow the examples in this chapter. You can download fedora from the following link:

https://getfedora.org/en/workstation/download/

We will start this chapter by describing the state of a virtual machine during its lifecycle:

  • Undefined: This is a state where the virtual machine is neither created nor defined in libvirt.

  • Defined/Shutoff: In this state, libvirt is aware of the virtual machine. The configuration file to define and start a virtual machine is available in /etc/libvirt/qemu. We can also...