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CCC · VirtualisationCurated

Virtualisation with KVM

Summary

Andre Steincke explains KVM as part of the Linux kernel and covers guest management, migration, high availability and graphical tools such as virt-manager. Kernel integration ties virtualisation directly to Linux scheduling and memory management. Operational tools often matter more for everyday use than the hypervisor alone.

Ideas

  • KVM uses hardware virtualisation and turns Linux itself into a hypervisor.
  • QEMU provides the virtual devices and the process framework of a guest.
  • libvirt unifies the management, networks and storage of different virtualisation tools.

Recommendations

  • Separate guest, storage and management networks in a traceable way.
  • Test recovery and migration with realistic amounts of data.

References

Watch the talk

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