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

Methods to access a virtual machine console

There are multiple ways to connect to a virtual machine console. If your environment has full GUI access, then the easiest method is to use the virt-manager console itself. virt-viewer is another tool that can give you access to your virtual machine console. This tool is very helpful if you are trying to access a virtual machine console from a remote location. In the following example, we are going to make a connection to a remote hypervisor that has an IP of 192.168.122.1. The connection is tunneled through an SSH session and is secure.

The first step is to set up an authentication system without a password between your client system and the hypervisor:

  1. On the client machine, use the following code:
    # ssh-keygen
    # ssh-copy-id [email protected]
    # virt-viewer -c qemu+ssh://[email protected]/system

    You will be presented with a list of virtual machines available on the hypervisor. Select the one you have to access, as shown in the...