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

Introducing virt-manager


The virt-manager application is a Python-based desktop user interface for managing virtual machines through libvirt. It primarily targets KVM VMs, but also manages Xen and LXC (Linux containers) among others. virt-manager displays a summary view of running VMs, supplying their performance and resource utilization statistics. Using the virt-manager graphical interface, one can easily create new VMs, monitor them, and make configuration changes when required. An embedded VNC and SPICE client viewer presents a full graphical console to the VM.

As we mentioned in Chapter 3, Setting Up Standalone KVM Virtualization, virtual machines need CPU, memory, storage, and networking resources from the host. In this chapter we will explain the basic configuration of the KVM host and creating virtual machines using virt-manager.

Let's start the Virtual Machine Manager by executing the virt-manager command or by pressing Alt + F2 and it will then display the dialog box of virt-manager...