Part III Hypervisor-Independent Features #

Keeping the correct time in a VM Guest is one of the more difficult aspects of virtualization. Keeping the correct time is especially important for network applications and is also a prerequisite to do a live migration of a VM Guest.

Virtual Machines consist of disk images and definition files. Manually accessing and manipulating these guest components (outside of normal hypervisor processes) is possible, but inherently dangerous and risks compromising data integrity. libguestfs is a C library and a corresponding set of tools designed for safely accessing and modifying Virtual Machine disk images—outside of normal hypervisor processes, but without the risk normally associated with manual editing.

The QEMU guest agent (GA) runs inside the VM Guest and allows the VM Host Server to run commands in the guest operating system via libvirt. It supports many functions—for example, getting details about guest file systems, freezing and thawing file systems, or suspending or rebooting a guest.

Whenever a VM crashes, it is useful to collect a core dump of the VM memory for debugging and analysis. For physical machines, Kexec and Kdump takes care of collecting crash dumps. For virtual machines, it depends whether the guest is fully virtualized (FV) or paravirtualized (PV).