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 Open vSwitch


Open vSwitch is an open source OpenFlow-capable virtual switch. If you're familiar with VMware, think of it as an open source distributed virtual switch. To give you a fair idea of how great Open vSwitch (OVS) is, here is a brief feature list, as of version 2.3:

  • Visibility into inter VM communication via NetFlow and sFlow

  • Standard 802.1q VLAN model via trunking

  • Per VM interface traffic policing

  • NIC bonding

  • OpenFlow protocol support

  • Multiple tunneling protocols such as GRE, VxLAN, IPSec, and GRE over IPSEC

  • Mobility of states

See the full feature list here: http://Openvswitch.org/features/.

Comparison between Linux bridge and Open vSwitch

Before we go further and learn more about Open vSwitch including its architecture, let us quickly see how Open vSwitch is more feature-rich and powerful by comparing it with Linux bridge in terms of the operational functionalities provided:

Open vSwitch

  • Designed for virtual and cloud networking

  • Full L2-L4 matching capability

  • Decision in UserSpace...