Konstantin Ivanov - KVM Virtualization Cookbook

BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI

Copyright 2017 Packt Publishing

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First published: June 2017

Production reference: 1140617

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Konstantin Ivanov is a Linux systems engineer, an open source developer, and a technology blogger who has been designing, configuring, deploying, and administering large-scale, highly available Linux environments for more than 15 years.

His interests include large distributed systems and task automation, along with solving technical challenges involving multiple technology stacks.

Konstantin received two master of science in computer science degrees from universities in Bulgaria and the United States, specializing in system and network security and software engineering.

In his spare time, he loves writing technology blogs and spending time with his two boys.

Jay Payne has been a database administrator 5 at Rackspace for over 10 years, working on the design, development, implementation, and operation of storage systems.

Previously, Jay worked on billing and support systems for hosting companies. For the last 20 years, he has primarily focused on the data life cycle, from database architecture, administration, operations, and reporting to disaster recovery and compliance. He has domain experience in hosting, finance, billing, and customer-support industries.

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The foundation of most modern cloud deployments is some sort of virtualization technology, such as Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM). KVM has been part of the mainstream Linux kernel since version 2.6.20, released in February 2007, and since then has enjoyed wide system adoption.

Virtualization in general not only provides a way to fully utilize server resources, but also allows greater multitenancy, along with running various workloads on the same system.

The OpenStack cloud operating system uses KVM as its default compute driver, providing a centralized way of managing the lifecycle of virtual machines: from building, resizing, and migrating to pausing and terminating.

This book is about KVM and how to build and manage virtual machines in the most efficient way. Unlike containerization solutions such as Docker, KVM is designed to run an entire operating system rather than a single process. Although containerization has its advantages, full virtualization provides extra security by having the hypervisor layer between the guest OS and the host and added stability by running different guest kernels (kernel panic of the guest instance will not bring the entire host down) or entirely different operating systems.

This book takes a rather direct and pragmatic step-by-step approach--you will learn how to create custom guest images, install and configure QEMU and libvirt, resize and migrate instances, deploy monitoring, and provision guests using OpenStack and Python.

, Getting Started with QEMU and KVM, provides recipes for installing and configuring QEMU, creating and managing disk images, and running virtual machines with the qemu-system utility.

, Using libvirt to Manage KVM, covers everything that is needed to install, configure, and run KVM instances using libvirt. You will learn what packages and tools are required, along with different ways of configuring virtual machines using XML definition files. By the end of this chapter, you will have a Linux system with running KVM instances.

, KVM Networking with libvirt, will present recipes for working with the Linux Bridge and Open vSwitch and will demonstrate how to connect KVM instances using NAT, bridged, and PCI pass-through networking.