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

Building and inspecting KVM instances with OpenStack


In this recipe, we are going to build our first KVM instance using the OpenStack infrastructure we put in place in the previous recipes. Building a new KVM instance consists of the following steps:

  1. We send an API call to the nova-api service.
  2. The nova-api service requests a target compute host from the nova-scheduler service.
  3. nova-scheduler picks an available compute host, based on the configured filters, such as available memory, disk, and CPU utilization.
  4. Once the nova-scheduler selects an appropriate host, the nova-compute service on the selected host, requests the image from the Glance repository, if not already cached locally. Once the image is on the new server, nova-compute builds the new KVM instance.

Getting ready

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

  • A database server, a message queue, and memcached installed and configured, as described in the Preparing the host for the OpenStack deployment recipe.
  • The Glance...