Book Image

Mastering KVM Virtualization - Second Edition

By : Vedran Dakic, Humble Devassy Chirammal, Prasad Mukhedkar, Anil Vettathu
5 (1)
Book Image

Mastering KVM Virtualization - Second Edition

5 (1)
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 QEMU and libvirt

In Chapter 2, KVM as a Virtualization Solution, we started discussing KVM, QEMU, and various additional utilities that we can use to manage our KVM-based virtualization platform. As a machine emulator, QEMU will be used so that we can create and run our virtual machines on any supported platform – be it as an emulator or virtualizer. We're going to focus our time on the second paradigm, which is using QEMU as a virtualizer. This means that we will be able to execute our virtual machine code directly on a hardware CPU below it, which means native or near-native performance and less overhead.

Bearing in mind that the overall KVM stack is built as a module, it shouldn't come as a surprise that QEMU also uses a modular approach. This has been a core principle in the Linux world for many years, which further boosts the efficiency of how we use our physical resources.

When we add libvirt as a management platform on top of...