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

Introduction


In this chapter, we are going to explore various configuration options and tools that can help improve the performance of the host OS and the KVM instances running on it.

When running KVM virtual machines, it's important to understand that from the host perspective, they are regular processes. We can see that KVM guests are Linux processes by examining the process tree on the hypervisor:

root@kvm:~# virsh list
 Id  Name State
----------------------------------------------------
 16  kvm  running

root@kvm:~# pgrep -lfa qemu
19913 /usr/bin/qemu-system-x86_64 -name kvm -S -machine pc-i440fx-trusty,accel=kvm,usb=off -m 1024 -realtime mlock=off -smp 1,sockets=1,cores=1,threads=1 -uuid 283c6653-9981-9396-efb4-fb864d87f769 -no-user-config -nodefaults -chardev socket,id=charmonitor,path=/var/lib/libvirt/qemu/domain-kvm/monitor.sock,server,nowait -mon chardev=charmonitor,id=monitor,mode=control -rtc base=utc -no-shutdown -boot strict=on -device piix3-usb-uhci,id=usb,bus=pci.0,addr=0x1...