Preface

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.