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

Creating virtual machines through Kimchi WebUI


Kimchi uses the concepts of templates that can be re-used to create similar guests. Its a two step task to create a virtual machine:

  1. Create a template from an ISO or a pre-installed guest OS image file.

  2. Deploy the VM from the template; Kimchi automatically allocates a new disk and gets emulated hardware configuration according to the template chosen.

    To create a new guest, click on the Guests menu item, and then click on the green + icon. Simply give your virtual machine a name, select a template to build it from, and click on Create. That's all.

    Create a New Virtual Machine dialogue box

Your virtual machine is ready. Memory, CPU, vDisk size, and other configurations options are inherited from the template to the virtual machine. If your template is ISO backed, you will have to manually install the operating system on the newly created virtual machine, but if it's image backed, the manual guest operating system installation is not required. The template...