The Ghost Operator's Signal
Virtualization is an aging superstar.
It was the hero – decades ago.
Containers lived only on ships.
Clouds painted just the sky.
Hypervisors sprout from necessity.
To segment.
To conceal.
To control.
Then the market turned diluted.
“Market-ready” hypervisors emerged from the fog.
KVM stood.
Silent.
Watching.
In virtualization, Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) is a leading choice for enterprises and developers due to its open-source nature, stability, and performance. Managing virtual machines (VMs) on KVM, however, can be complex, especially in large-scale environments. This is where KVM Cockpit steps in as a game-changing solution. KVM Cockpit simplifies and automates the lifecycle management of KVM VMs, offering a robust toolset that enhances efficiency, reduces operational overhead, and improves overall system reliability.
Continue reading “KVM Cockpit: A Powerful Tool for Managing KVM VM Lifecycle”
Ansible is a powerful automation tool that simplifies the management of IT infrastructure. One of its strengths is the ability to work with dynamic inventories, which allow Ansible to discover and manage systems on-the-fly. When working with a KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) environment, leveraging a dynamic inventory can significantly streamline the management of virtual machines (VMs) throughout their lifecycle.
Continue reading “Using Dynamic KVM Inventories with Ansible for VM Lifecycle and Configuration Management”
Encrypting storage volumes ensures that sensitive information is protected, even if physical devices are lost or stolen. This post will guide you through encrypting KVM volumes as LVM logical volumes on Debian 12. We’ll cover setting up LVM, encrypting the volumes with LUKS (Linux Unified Key Setup), and integrating them into your KVM setup.
Continue reading “Encrypting KVM Volumes as LVM Logical Volumes with LUKS”
An important aspect of virtualization is ensuring the security of the disk images used by VMs. Encrypting these disk images helps protect sensitive data from unauthorized access. This post will guide you through the process of encrypting a KVM QCOW2 disk image using LUKS (Linux Unified Key Setup).
Continue reading “Encrypting KVM QCOW2 Disk Images with LUKS”
When managing virtual machines (VMs) in a Linux environment, using Logical Volume Manager (LVM) with Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) provides several benefits. LVM offers flexibility and control over storage allocation, while KVM, combined with virsh, offers a robust virtualization solution. This guide will walk you through the process of setting up LVM logical volumes for your KVM guests using virsh.
KVM supports a variety of storage types, each catering to different performance and feature requirements. The Raw format is simple and offers high I/O performance but lacks advanced features like snapshots. QCOW2 is more feature-rich, supporting snapshots, compression, and encryption, though it has higher CPU overhead and slightly lower performance. LVM (Logical Volume Manager) offers good performance and easy resizing with thin provisioning, though it can be complex to manage. Network-based storage solutions like iSCSI and NFS provide scalability and shared access, with iSCSI offering block-level and NFS file-level access, both supporting live migration and snapshots. Distributed storage systems like Ceph and GlusterFS are highly scalable and fault-tolerant, ideal for large environments, but require significant setup. Finally, ZFS stands out for its advanced data integrity and management features, making it suitable for environments where robustness is crucial. Each of these storage types supports essential features like live migration and snapshots, enhancing KVM’s flexibility in various use cases.
Continue reading “KVM Storage Support and Features”
A serial console provides a text-based interface for accessing a system, especially when graphical interfaces are unavailable or network connections are down. It allows you to interact with the system using a terminal program, even during boot sequences or critical failures. Here are some scenarios where serial consoles prove beneficial.
Continue reading “Serial Console in KVM”
For system administrators looking to automate deployments, using Kickstart files for automated installations can be a highly efficient approach. This lesson will show you how to install Rocky Linux 9 on a KVM virtual machine using a Kickstart file and the virsh command-line tool.
Snapshots are a powerful feature of KVM that allow you to capture the state of a virtual machine (VM) at a specific point in time. This capability is valuable for system administrators and developers who need to create temporary backups, test changes, or recover from errors. In this lesson, we’ll explore how to manage KVM snapshots using the virsh command-line tool on a Linux server.
The primary difference between a macvlan and a bridge interface solution lies in how they handle network traffic and their compatibility with different types of network interfaces, particularly Wi-Fi. On a consumer notebook, like a ThinkPad it is almost impossible to create a bridge interface, so your KVM virtual machines are unreachable from the host.
Continue reading “macvlan vs Bridge Interface: Wi-Fi Compatibility and Benefits”
KVM storage volumes are virtual disk images that can be assigned to virtual machines. They are stored on the host system and presented to the guest as virtual hard drives. The most commonly used image format for KVM storage volumes is qcow2 (QEMU Copy-On-Write 2). qcow2 is a sparse format that only allocates disk space as needed, allowing multiple volumes to efficiently share the same base image using copy-on-write. This saves disk space compared to raw disk images. qcow2 also supports features like snapshots, encryption, and compression.
Storage pools in KVM virtualization are a way to centrally manage and organize storage resources for virtual machines. A storage pool is a designated area of storage, such as a directory, partition, or network-based storage, that is set aside for use by KVM virtual machines. Once a storage pool is created and started, storage volumes can be defined within the pool and assigned to VMs.
Continue reading “Creating and Managing KVM Storage Pools Effectively”
virt-install is a command-line tool used to provision new virtual machines (VMs) using the libvirt hypervisor management library. It supports creating KVM, Xen, or Linux container guests and can configure various aspects such as virtual disks, network interfaces, audio devices, and physical USB or PCI devices. The installation media can be held locally or remotely on NFS, HTTP, or FTP servers.
Continue reading “Install and Remove KVM Guests With virt-install”
Migrating just a couple of virtual machines from other virtualization platforms to KVM is easy. Virtualbox uses the Virtual Disk Image (.vdi) format. You can clone the vdi image to a RAW image format using vboxmanage. This way you will not alter your original virtual image file. Then QEMU provides the necessary tools to convert the RAW image to the qcow2 format. Qcow2 is QEMU’s Copy On Write image format.
Tom's IT Cafe 