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

Integrating KVM VMs and OVS


You learned how to create an OVS bridge and were introduced to various Open vSwitch command-line tools. Now it's time to start using Open vSwitch as a virtual networking infrastructure for the KVM virtual machines and experience the features and all the great benefits it provides.

For existing virtual machines, it is good to attach the virtual machine directly to the Open vSwitch bridge by modifying its XML file. Let us take the example of the virtual machine VM001. This VM is currently attached to a regular Linux bridge named br0 on the same host on which we created the vswitch001 OVS bridge. The following procedure demonstrates the steps to migrate VMs from the Linux bridge to the smarter Open vSwitch bridge:

  1. Check the network configuration of the virtual machine. virsh will be handy in performing this task. The dumpxml option prints VM configuration information in XML:

    [root@kvmHOST1 ~]# virsh dumpxml vm001 | grep -i 'interface type' -A 5
    <interface type=...