The Ghost Operator's Signal
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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