Virtual Machine Manager. Howto: Linux and Windows virtualization with KVM and Qemu. In the wise words of Wikipedia, "Virtualisation is a broad term that refers to the abstraction of computer resources". Within this definition sits a whole variety of products - Sun's VirtualBox, Parallels, Bochs, Xen, KVM, Qemu, various flavours of VMware and many others.
And there's a great deal of jargon to confuse the unwary - emulation, full virtualisation, paravirtualisation, virtual appliance, hypervisor... the list goes on. And not everyone agrees exactly what all these terms actually mean. We're going to deliberately sidestep the jargon and the hype to take a practical look at the virtualisation technologies in Ubuntu, in particular KVM and Qemu and the related userspace tools that create and manage virtual machines. Although the discussion centres on Ubuntu, the technology is applicable to all Linux distros. Warning: if you're a little less experienced (or a little more time constrained!) You might find our other article, virtualisation made easy, a little easier to read. Virsh. The Kernel Virtual Machine. Ubuntu uses KVM as the back-end virtualization technology primarily for non-graphic servers and libvirt as its toolkit/API.
Libvirt front ends for managing VMs include virt-manager (GUI) or virsh (CLI). Alternative management options include convirt (GUI) or convirt2 (WWW). Installation - Installation and removal of KVM Networking - Network configuration; includes bridging Guest Creation - Creation of different kinds of guests Guest Management - Management of guests; command line or graphically Guest Console Access Direct access to the guest via the serial console KVM Directly - Using KVM directly (without libvirt) FAQ - Frequently asked questions, troubleshooting tips and other recommendations The use case targeted when KVM was moved into main is "server virtualization". This means that even though KVM can be used to serve other purposes, it has been designed to be run on Ubuntu Server Edition to host non-graphical server operating systems. CategoryVirtualization. Front Page - Kernel based Virtual Machine.