Book Image

KVM Virtualization Cookbook

Book Image

KVM Virtualization Cookbook

Overview of this book

Virtualization technologies such as KVM allow for better control over the available server resources, by deploying multiple virtual instances on the same physical host, or clusters of compute resources. With KVM it is possible to run various workloads in isolation with the hypervisor layer providing better tenant isolation and higher degree of security. This book will provide a deep dive into deploying KVM virtual machines using qemu and libvirt and will demonstrate practical examples on how to run, scale, monitor, migrate and backup such instances. You will also discover real production ready recipes on deploying KVM instances with OpenStack and how to programatically manage the life cycle of KVM virtual machines using Python. You will learn numerous tips and techniques which will help you deploy & plan the KVM infrastructure. Next, you will be introduced to the working of libvirt libraries and the iPython development environment. Finally, you will be able to tune your Linux kernel for high throughput and better performance. By the end of this book, you will gain all the knowledge needed to be an expert in working with the KVM virtualization infrastructure.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Configuring bridged network


With full bridging, we can connect the KVM guests directly to the host network, without using NAT. However, this setup requires an IP address, which is part of the host subnet, for each virtual machine. If you cannot allocate that many IP addresses, consider using the NAT network setup, as described in the Configuring NAT forwarding network recipe given before. In this networking mode, the virtual machines still use the host OS bridge for connectivity; however, the bridge enslaves the physical interface that is going to be used for the guests.

Getting ready

For this recipe, we are going to need the following:

  • A server with at least two physical interfaces
  • The ability to provision and start KVM instances with libvirt
  • A running KVM instance

How to do it...

To define a new bridged network and attach a guest to it, follow the steps:

  1. Take down the interface we are going to bridge:
root@kvm:~# ifdown eth1
root@kvm:~#
  1. Edit the network configuration file on the host and replace...