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

Starting a virtual machine using QEMU and libvirt

After the deployment process, we can start managing our virtual machines. We will use MasteringKVM01 and MasteringKVM02 as an example. Let's start them by using the virsh command, along with the start keyword:

Figure 3.8 – Using the virsh start command

Let's say that we created all five of our virtual machines from the shell script example and that we left them powered on. We can easily check their status by issuing a simple virsh list command:

Figure 3.9 – Using the virsh list command

If we want to gracefully shut down the MasteringKVM01 virtual machine, we can do so by using the virsh shutdown command:

Figure 3.10 – Using the virsh shutdown command

If we want to forcefully shut down the MasteringKVM02 virtual machine, we can do so by using the virsh destroy command:

Figure 3.11 –...