Part II Managing virtual machines with libvirt
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- 8
libvirt
daemons A libvirt deployment for accessing KVM or Xen requires one or more daemons to be installed and active on the host. libvirt provides two daemon deployment options: monolithic or modular daemons. libvirt has always provided the single monolithic daemon libvirtd. It includes the primary hypervisor driv…
- 9 Preparing the VM Host Server
Before you can install guest virtual machines, you need to prepare the VM Host Server to provide the guests with the resources that they need for their operation. Specifically, you need to configure:
- 10 Guest installation
A VM Guest consists of an image containing an operating system and data files and a configuration file describing the VM Guest's virtual hardware resources. VM Guests are hosted on and controlled by the VM Host Server. This section provides generalized instructions for installing a VM Guest. For a l…
- 11 Basic VM Guest management
Most management tasks, such as starting or stopping a VM Guest, can either be done using the graphical application Virtual Machine Manager or on the command line using
virsh
. Connecting to the graphical console via VNC is only possible from a graphical user interface.- 12 Connecting and authorizing
Managing several VM Host Servers, each hosting multiple VM Guests, quickly becomes difficult. One benefit of
libvirt
is the ability to connect to several VM Host Servers at once, providing a single interface to manage all VM Guests and to connect to their graphical console.- 13 Advanced storage topics
This chapter introduces advanced topics about manipulating storage from the perspective of the VM Host Server.
- 14 Configuring virtual machines with Virtual Machine Manager
Virtual Machine Manager's
view offers in-depth information about the VM Guest's complete configuration and hardware equipment. Using this view, you can also change the guest configuration or add and modify virtual hardware. To access this view, open the guest's console in Virtual Machine Manager and either choose › from the menu, or click in the toolbar.- 15 Configuring virtual machines with
virsh
You can use
virsh
to configure virtual machines (VM) on the command line as an alternative to using the Virtual Machine Manager. Withvirsh
, you can control the state of a VM, edit the configuration of a VM or even migrate a VM to another host. The following sections describe how to manage VMs by usingvirsh
.- 16 Xen to KVM migration guide
As the KVM virtualization solution is becoming more and more popular among server administrators, many of them need a path to migrate their existing Xen based environments to KVM. As of now, there are no mature tools to automatically convert Xen VMs to KVM. There is, however, a technical solution th…