Book Image

Mastering Proxmox - Second Edition

By : Wasim Ahmed
Book Image

Mastering Proxmox - Second Edition

By: Wasim Ahmed

Overview of this book

Proxmox is an open source server virtualization solution that has enterprise-class features to manage virtual machines, to be used for storage, and to virtualize both Linux and Windows application workloads. You begin with refresher on the advanced installation features and the Proxmox GUI to familiarize yourself with the Proxmox VE hypervisor. You then move on to explore Proxmox under the hood, focusing on the storage systems used with Proxmox. Moving on, you will learn to manage KVM Virtual Machines and Linux Containers and see how networking is handled in Proxmox. You will then learn how to protect a cluster or a VM with a firewall and explore the new HA features introduced in Proxmox VE 4 along with the brand new HA simulator. Next, you will dive deeper into the backup/restore strategy followed by learning how to properly update and upgrade a Proxmox node. Later, you will learn how to monitor a Proxmox cluster and all of its components using Zabbix. By the end of the book, you will become an expert at making Proxmox environments work in production environments with minimum downtime.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Mastering Proxmox - Second Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Exploring a KVM


As the name implies, a KVM adds the hypervisor ability to a Linux kernel. KVM allows you to create fully isolated virtual machines while not being dependent on the host kernel. The isolation is created by emulating several pieces of hardware, such as CPU, RAM, Sound/Video/Network card, PCI bridges, and Keyboard/Mouse input devices. Since KVM is not dependent on the host kernel, it is able to virtualize a wide range of operating systems, such as Linux, BSD, Windows, OS X, and so on. One of the main differences between KVM and container-based virtual machines is that the allocated resources for KVM is isolated from each other and the host.

Thus, the density of the number of KVM VMs in a node is much lower than containers. KVM are the only choice for non-Linux operating systems and for purpose-built operating systems based on Linux, such as ClearOS, FreeNAS, Zentyal, and so on. For more information on KVM, refer to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernel-based_Virtual_Machine.