Book Image

Mastering KVM Virtualization

Book Image

Mastering KVM Virtualization

Overview of this book

A robust datacenter is essential for any organization – but you don’t want to waste resources. With KVM you can virtualize your datacenter, transforming a Linux operating system into a powerful hypervisor that allows you to manage multiple OS with minimal fuss. This book doesn’t just show you how to virtualize with KVM – it shows you how to do it well. Written to make you an expert on KVM, you’ll learn to manage the three essential pillars of scalability, performance and security – as well as some useful integrations with cloud services such as OpenStack. From the fundamentals of setting up a standalone KVM virtualization platform, and the best tools to harness it effectively, including virt-manager, and kimchi-project, everything you do is built around making KVM work for you in the real-world, helping you to interact and customize it as you need it. With further guidance on performance optimization for Microsoft Windows and RHEL virtual machines, as well as proven strategies for backup and disaster recovery, you’ll can be confident that your virtualized data center is working for your organization – not hampering it. Finally, the book will empower you to unlock the full potential of cloud through KVM. Migrating your physical machines to the cloud can be challenging, but once you’ve mastered KVM, it’s a little easie.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Mastering KVM Virtualization
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Physical system to virtual conversion


virt-v2v can to talk to a foreign hypervisor to obtain a VM's virtual hardware information and metadata. But when the source is a physical system, virt-v2v cannot gather information on hardware. To solve this virt-v2v relies on a small bootable image to run a tool named virt-p2v on the physical host. virt-p2v sends the physical system's data over SSH to the virt-v2v host, which then convert it to a VM on the target hypervisor.

Creating a virt-p2v bootable image

virt-p2v bootable media is unfortunately not available on any official Fedora site for download. You will need build it on your own using either the virt-p2v-make-disk (http://libguestfs.org/virt-p2v-make-disk.1.html) or virt-p2v-make-kickstart (http://libguestfs.org/virt-p2v-make-kickstart.1.html) utilities. Both these utilities are part of the virt-v2v package. Perform the following steps in order to create a virt-p2v bootable image:

  1. Write a virt-p2v bootable USB key on /dev/sdX:

    #virt-p2v-make...