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

Getting acquainted with libvirt


Libvirt is a set of API libraries that sits in between the end user and the hypervisor. The hypervisor can be built using any virtualization technology that libvirt supports. At the time of writing, libvirt supports the following hypervisors:

  • The KVM/QEMU Linux hypervisor

  • The Xen hypervisor on Linux and Solaris hosts

  • The LXC Linux container system

  • The OpenVZ Linux container system

  • The User Mode Linux paravirtualized kernel

  • The VirtualBox hypervisor

  • The VMware ESX and GSX hypervisors

  • The VMware Workstation and Player hypervisors

  • The Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisor

  • The IBM PowerVM hypervisor

  • The Parallels hypervisor

  • The Bhyve hypervisor

libvirt acts as a transparent layer that takes commands from users, modifies them based on the underlying virtualization technology, and then executes them on the hypervisor. This means that if you know how to use libvirt-based management tools, you should be able to manage the preceding set of hypervisors without knowing them individually....