Tomorrow’s Virtualization hopes

 Sometimes, one is just not enough. When you’ve got one server with rocketing performance, you could very well make the maximum utilization of it. Obviously, I’m talking about Virtualization. We’ve had quite a lot of products out there in the market. Many of them proprietary and a few, free. I have read once, “A nice product which is free is better than a great product which costs.” But today, my choice is one awesome product which is free, and is absolutely fabulous. I’m going to talk about my own favorite Virtualization Solution- KVM.

KVM, Kernel-based Virtual Machine is a complete and perfect virtualization solution for Linux. With KVM, you can have multiple machines running anything they want, may it be Linux or Windows. To make things brighter, from 2.6.20, the mainline linux will have a kernel component of KVM. That means faster and more stable workloads.

One thing which grabbed our attention was, during the migration the KVM gave almost negligible down-time and completed the migration perfectly well. And guess what, the KVM reminded me of those days in college when we learned about the ACID properties of database. Upon success of migration, the whole set-up will continue to run on the new host. Upon failure, everything remains as it ever were. That is, it will continue to work on the source host, again without down-time.

Now, we’ve got plenty of Management tools available for working our way around up in here. One such tool is Virtual Machine Manager. This one is also known as virt-manager. It acts as desktop user interface for managing virtual machines. It is sweet, and acts as a complete tool kit for managing our resource. Virt-manager contains many tools like

• Virt Install- a cli interface for provisioning the various OS’s


• Virt Clone- a cli tool for cloning existing inactive guests


• Virt Image- a tool for installing guest operating systems based on a pre-defined master image.


• Virtual Machine Viewer- s a lightweight interface for interacting with the graphical display of virtualized guest OS.

KVM can very well be proclaimed as the immediate future of Virtualization, and rightfully so. With the kind of tools available for managing it, I feel the “immediate future” is going to extend for quite some time.