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 the previous chapter, we saw examples of provisioning virtual machines using the QEMU toolset and the KVM kernel modules. The QEMU commands are convenient for quickly starting virtual instances; however, they don't provide an easy way of configuring and administering the life cycle of the virtual machines.

In this chapter, we are going to work with the libvirt toolset. Libivrt provides various userspace commands and language bindings in order to build, configure, start, stop, migrate, terminate, and do other functions to manage your virtual machines. It provides support for different virtualization technologies, such as QEMU/KVM, XEN, and containers with LXC.

We will start by installing and configuring the libvirt tools, then move on to creating virtual machines using the XML configuration files that libvirt supports and explore many of the functionalities that the toolkit provides in order to manage the life cycle of KVM instances. All the recipes in this chapter are going...