This document provides an overview of virtualization using KVM and oVirt. It discusses the architecture of KVM and Xen, how Qemu works with KVM, and the Libvirt architecture. It also covers installing KVM on CentOS, checking for hardware virtualization support, and installing required packages. Finally, it briefly introduces oVirt and provides some reference documentation links.

1. Drive
into
By
Udayendu Kar
Technical Architect
Avaya India Pvt Ltd

2. Agenda:
 Virtualization with KVM & oVirt
 KVM vs Xen architecture
 Combination of Qemu & KVM
 Libvirt architecture
 KVM userspace tools
 virt-manager
 oVirt
 Questions ?

7. Qemu + KVM
 Qemu (userspace tool)
 KVM (Hypervisor)

8. Libvirt as an interface between user space and kernel space. The
below image indicates all the supported tools in user and kernel
spaces.
Refer: http://wiki.libvirt.org/page/Main_Page

10. CentOS 6 64-Bit EPEL repo:
# wget http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/x86_64/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm
# rpm -ivh epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm
Check Hardware Virtualization Supoort:
KVM requires hardware virtualization support such as Intel VT or AMD's AMD-V, which are instruction set
extensions for hardware-assisted virtualization. Check if hardware virtualization support is available on
CentOS host machine:
$ egrep -i 'vmx|svm' --color=always /proc/cpuinfo
If CPU flags contain "vmx" or "svm", it means hardware virtualization support is available.
Install KVM, QEMU and user-space tools:
a) Install KVM, virt-manager and virtinst (a tool to create VMs) as follows:
# yum install kvm libvirt python-virtinst qemu-kvm virt-manager qemu-system-x86
openssh-askpass libcanberra-devel virt-install virsh
b) Start libvirtd daemon, and set it to auto-start:
# service libvirtd start
# chkconfig libvirtd on
Then use virt-manager tool to start the virtual machine creation.

11. Architecture
oVirt manages virtual machines, storage and virtualized networks. It is a
virtualization platform with an easy-to-use web interface and is powered by the
Open Source you know - KVM on Linux.

12. Reference Documentation Links:
 http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/Main_Page
 https://virt-manager.org/
 http://www.ovirt.org/

13. Questions ??