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 to be in the context of building highly available, multitenant environments.