When I first started using KVM, I was quite disappointed with the graphical management abilities of KVM. Basically if you want to manage via the command line KVM is a fantasical dream world where anything is possible and it is all “musical sunshine” and “double rainbows” but if you want…
Linux-KVM: Managing Disk Images
Disk images have long been the traditional form of storage for virtualized environments, they are essentially containers in the form of a file on the host’s file system. These files can be either fully allocated or sparsely allocated at time of disk creation, a fully allocated 20GB disk image will…
KVM Guests: Manipulating Libvirt XML for Guest Creation
Today we are going to discuss using the underlying XML which libvirt uses to define a VM to either create VMs or to make simple changes. This method has the advantage of more control over what you are creating, although it is more manual. Now first off, when you use…
KVM Guests: Using Virt-Install to Install VMs from a CD or ISO Image
In my previous article KVM Guests: Using Virt-Install to Import an Existing Disk Image we discussed how to use virt-install to import an existing disk image, which already has an OS installed into it. Additionally in KVM Guests: Using Virt-Install to Install Debian and Ubuntu Guests I documented how to…
Linux-KVM: Taking Advantage of Memory Deduplication
Kernel Samepage Merging (KSM) is essentially active memory deduplication. What does this means for our KVM guests? Basically the more similar guests we have running, the more of a memory footprint they share, which means less memory they actually hold. These free pages can then be reutilized by the host…