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Managing KVM Deployments with Virt-Manager

Issue 201

From Issue #201
January 2011

Mar 01, 2011  By Michael J. Hammel
 in
The Virtual Machine Manager tools (aka virt-manager and libvirt) make it simple to set up and manage multiple KVM-based virtual machines.
Summary

libvirt provides many features to do more complex things with virtual machines, such as storage, networking and USB/PCI options. All of those features should be accessed using the virsh command-line tool. virt-manager provides GUI-based wizards for creating new virtual machines and allows dynamic reconfiguration of the boot device while displaying interactive performance graphs (Figure 4). For home users, the best feature of virt-manager is its ability to show multiple VM consoles at the same time.

Figure 4. Processor and memory usage can be adjusted dynamically up to the configured maximum for the guest.

Other distributions will work with KVM, although the creation of the host bridged network is likely to be different. Advanced users may want to investigate the use of Logical Volume Managers (LVMs) instead of flat-file images to improve performance.

Resources

Virtual Machine Manager: virt-manager.et.redhat.com

libvirt: libvirt.org

QEMU: wiki.qemu.org

KVM: www.linux-kvm.org

KVM on Fedora 11: www.howtoforge.com/virtualization-with-kvm-on-a-fedora-11-server

Shared Networks on Fedora: fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/Shared_Network_Interface

libvirt Networking: wiki.libvirt.org/page/Networking#Fedora.2FRHEL_Bridging

Michael J. Hammel is a Principal Software Engineer for Colorado Engineering, Inc. (CEI), in Colorado Springs, Colorado, with more than 20 years of software development and management experience. He has written more than 100 articles for numerous on-line and print magazines and is the author of three books on The GIMP, the premier open-source graphics editing package.

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Configuring the host for DHCP address assignment

thyrsus's picture
Submitted by thyrsus on Mon, 05/09/2011 - 13:05.

I'm confused by the paragraph describing configuration of the host for DHCP network access. The lines listed are to be left "out"? Out of which file - ifcfg-br0 or ifcfg-eth0? My first guess would be that ifcfg-eth0 should contain the same contents as for a statically addressed host, and that the lines listed should appear in ifcfg-br0. Please clarify.

Thanks.

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