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

Verifying the KVM service status

We're starting off with the simplest of all examples – verifying the KVM service status and some of its normal influence on host configuration.

In Chapter 3, Installing a KVM Hypervisor, libvirt, and ovirt, we did a basic installation of the overall KVM stack by installing virt module and using the dnf command to deploy various packages. There are a couple of reasons why this might not end up being a good idea:

  • A lot of servers, desktops, workstations, and laptops come pre-configured with virtualization turned off in BIOS. If you're using an Intel-based CPU, make sure that you find all the VT-based options and enable them (VT, VT-d, VT I/O). If you're using an AMD-based CPU, make sure that you turn on AMD-V. There's a simple test that you can do to check if virtualization is enabled. If you boot any Linux live distribution, go to the shell and type in the following command:
    cat /proc/cpuinfo | egrep "vmx|svm...