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 PCI passthrough network


The KVM hypervisor supports directly attaching PCI devices from the host OS to the virtual machines. We can use this feature to attach a network interface directly to the guest OS, without the need for using NAT or software bridges. In this recipe, we are going to attach a Network Interface Card (NIC) that supports SR-IOV Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) from the host to the KVM guest. SR-IOV is a specification that allows a Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe ) device to appear as multiple separate physical devices that can be shared between many virtual machines on the same host, bypassing the hypervisor layer, thus achieving native network speeds. Cloud providers such as Amazon AWS expose this feature for its EC2 compute instances through API calls.

Getting ready

In order to complete this recipe, we are going to need the following:

  • A physical host with NIC that supports SR-IOV
  • A 802.1Qbh capable switch with connection to the physical...