Book Image

Mastering KVM Virtualization - Second Edition

By : Vedran Dakic, Humble Devassy Chirammal, Prasad Mukhedkar, Anil Vettathu
Book Image

Mastering KVM Virtualization - Second Edition

By: Vedran Dakic, Humble Devassy Chirammal, Prasad Mukhedkar, Anil Vettathu

Overview of this book

Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) enables you to virtualize your data center by transforming your Linux operating system into a powerful hypervisor that allows you to manage multiple operating systems with minimal fuss. With this book, you'll gain insights into configuring, troubleshooting, and fixing bugs in KVM virtualization and related software. This second edition of Mastering KVM Virtualization is updated to cover the latest developments in the core KVM components - libvirt and QEMU. Starting with the basics of Linux virtualization, you'll explore VM lifecycle management and migration techniques. You’ll then learn how to use SPICE and VNC protocols while creating VMs and discover best practices for using snapshots. As you progress, you'll integrate third-party tools with Ansible for automation and orchestration. You’ll also learn to scale out and monitor your environments, and will cover oVirt, OpenStack, Eucalyptus, AWS, and ELK stack. Throughout the book, you’ll find out more about tools such as Cloud-Init and Cloudbase-Init. Finally, you'll be taken through the performance tuning and troubleshooting guidelines for KVM-based virtual machines and a hypervisor. By the end of this book, you'll be well-versed with KVM virtualization and the tools and technologies needed to build and manage diverse virtualization environments.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
1
Section 1: KVM Virtualization Basics
4
Section 2: libvirt and ovirt for Virtual Machine Management
11
Section 3: Automation, Customization, and Orchestration for KVM VMs
15
Section 4: Scalability, Monitoring, Performance Tuning, and Troubleshooting

Getting acquainted with KSM

KSM is a feature that allows the sharing of identical pages between the different processes running on a system. We might presume that the identical pages exist due to certain reasons—for example, if there are multiple processes spawned from the same binary or something similar. There is no rule such as this though. KSM scans these identical memory pages and consolidates a Copy-on-Write (COW) shared page. COW is nothing but a mechanism where when there is an attempt to change a memory region that is shared and common to more than one process, the process that requests the change gets a new copy and the changes are saved in it.

Even though the consolidated COW shared page is accessible by all the processes, whenever a process tries to change the content (write to that page), the process gets a new copy with all of the changes. By now, you will have understood that, by using KSM, we can reduce physical memory consumption. In the KVM context, this...