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.

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Mastering KVM Virtualization
Aug, 2016 | 468 pages
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Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Mastering KVM Virtualization
Mastering KVM Virtualization
Credits
Credits
About the Authors
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Understanding Linux Virtualization
Understanding Linux Virtualization
What is virtualization?
Why should I use Linux virtualization?
Types of virtualization
Operating system virtualization/partitioning
Hardware assisted virtualization
Introducing VMM/hypervisor
Open source virtualization projects
What Linux virtualization offers you in the cloud
Summary
2
KVM Internals
KVM Internals
Getting acquainted with libvirt and its implementation
Internal workings of libvirt
Time to think more about QEMU
KVM in action
Anonymous inodes and file structures
Execution flow of vCPU
Summary
3
Setting Up Standalone KVM Virtualization
Setting Up Standalone KVM Virtualization
Getting acquainted with libvirt
Hardware configuration examples
Summary
4
Getting Started with libvirt and Creating Your First Virtual Machines
Getting Started with libvirt and Creating Your First Virtual Machines
Introducing virt-manager
Creating virtual machines using the Virtual Machine Manager
Introducing virt-install
Automated virtual machine deployment
Summary
5
Network and Storage
Network and Storage
Virtual networking
Virtual networking using libvirt
MacVTap
passthrough
It's all about storage!
Summary
6
Virtual Machine Lifecycle Management
Virtual Machine Lifecycle Management
QEMU guest agent
Virtual video cards and graphics
VM migration
Shared storage
Enabling lockd
Live or online migration
Summary
7
Templates and Snapshots
Templates and Snapshots
Introducing virtual machine templates
Working with templates
Deploying virtual machines from a template
Deploying VMs using the clone provisioning method
Deploying VMs using the thin provisioning method
Snapshots
Summary
8
Kimchi – An HTML5-Based Management Tool for KVM/libvirt
Kimchi – An HTML5-Based Management Tool for KVM/libvirt
Libvirt Web API
Introduction to the Kimchi project
Setting up Kimchi server
Managing KVM virtualization infrastructure using kimchi WebUI
Creating virtual machines through Kimchi WebUI
Managing virtual machine through android phones
Summary
9
Software-Defined Networking for KVM Virtualization
Software-Defined Networking for KVM Virtualization
Introducing Software Defined Networking
Introducing Open vSwitch
Integrating KVM VMs and OVS
VLANs with Open vSwitch
Applying traffic rate limiting
Overlay networks
Configuring Open vSwitch tunnels with VxLan
Network port mirroring
Managing Open vSwitch using the OpenDaylight SDN controller
Basic Open vSwitch troubleshooting
Summary
10
Installing and Configuring the Virtual Datacenter Using oVirt
Installing and Configuring the Virtual Datacenter Using oVirt
Introducing oVirt
Installing the oVirt engine
Summary
11
Starting Your First Virtual Machine in oVirt
Starting Your First Virtual Machine in oVirt
Getting acquainted with oVirt data center and cluster
Creating storage domains
Creating logical networks
Creating and starting a virtual machine
What next?
Summary
12
Deploying OpenStack Private Cloud backed by KVM Virtualization
Deploying OpenStack Private Cloud backed by KVM Virtualization
OpenStack architecture
OpenStack deployment
Launching First Instance
Troubleshooting the virtualization layer of OpenStack
Accessing the instance configuration database
QEMU Monitor Protocol
Summary
13
Performance Tuning and Best Practices in KVM
Performance Tuning and Best Practices in KVM
VirtIO
CPU tuning
Working with memory
Getting acquainted with Kernel Same Page merging
Tuning CPU and memory with NUMA
Disk and block I/O tuning
Networking tuning in KVM
KVM guest time-keeping best practices
Summary
14
V2V and P2V Migration Tools
V2V and P2V Migration Tools
Introducing the virt-v2v utility
How does virt-v2v work?
VMware guest conversion
Xen guest conversion
Converting standalone KVM guests to an oVirt Virtualization platform and the OpenStack cloud
Troubleshooting virt-v2v related issues
Physical system to virtual conversion
Can we convert any physical computers to virtual using virt-v2v?
Converting virtual machines from unsupported virtualization platforms
Summary
Converting a Virtual Machine into a Hypervisor
Converting a Virtual Machine into a Hypervisor
Introducing nested KVM
How to enable nested KVM?
Index
Index

Hardware configuration examples

Let us take a look at some common hardware configurations; the domcapabilities options of virsh commands will show you the host capabilities. You can parse the output to find the exact supported value of a particular hardware configuration which you can present to a virtual machine. The following is the maximum vcpu that you can present to a VM:

[root@kvmHOST ~]# virsh domcapabilities  | grep -i max
  <vcpu max='255'/>
[root@kvmHOST ~]#

As per the output, on this host a maximum of 255 vcpus can be defined for a virtual machine:

[root@kvmHOST ~]# virsh domcapabilities  | grep diskDevice -A 5
    <enum name='diskDevice'>
      <value>disk</value>
      <value>cdrom</value>
      <value>floppy</value>
      <value>lun</value>
    </enum>
[root@kvmHOST ~]#

As per the output, disk, cdrom, floppy, and lun type devices can be used with the virtual machine on this host.

A lot of the physical node's hypervisor...

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