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

VLANs with Open vSwitch


Open vSwitch supports VLANS (Virtual LANs). You can create tagged as well as native VLANS on an OVS bridge to segment the network into different broadcast domains so that packets are only switched between ports that are designated for the same VLAN. The following are a few advantages of VLANs:

  • Increased bandwidth usage: less broadcast traffic on segments

  • Security enhanced: different VLANs cannot communicate directly

  • Isolated environments for specialized network applications

Configuring VLANs for KVM virtual machines

Let's consider a scenario. In a single Open vSwitch bridge, add two different VLANs and connect four guests to it. Two in VLAN1 with tag 10 and the others in VLAN2 with tag 20. As a result, VMS can communicate in the same VLAN, whereas, between different VLANs, they cannot:

  1. This walkthrough assumes you already have four virtual machines defined on the host and they are connected to an OVS bridge.

  2. I am using an OVS bridge named vswitch001 and four fedora 21 VMs...