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openSUSE Leap Documentation › Virtualization Guide › Introduction › Introduction to KVM Virtualization
ContentsContents
Virtualization Guide
  1. About This Manual
  2. I Introduction
    1. 1 Virtualization Technology
    2. 2 Introduction to Xen Virtualization
    3. 3 Introduction to KVM Virtualization
    4. 4 Introduction to Linux Containers
    5. 5 Virtualization Tools
    6. 6 Installation of Virtualization Components
  3. II Managing Virtual Machines with libvirt
    1. 7 Starting and Stopping libvirtd
    2. 8 Guest Installation
    3. 9 Basic VM Guest Management
    4. 10 Connecting and Authorizing
    5. 11 Managing Storage
    6. 12 Managing Networks
    7. 13 Configuring Virtual Machines with Virtual Machine Manager
    8. 14 Configuring Virtual Machines with virsh
  4. III Hypervisor-Independent Features
    1. 15 Disk Cache Modes
    2. 16 VM Guest Clock Settings
    3. 17 libguestfs
  5. IV Managing Virtual Machines with Xen
    1. 18 Setting Up a Virtual Machine Host
    2. 19 Virtual Networking
    3. 20 Managing a Virtualization Environment
    4. 21 Block Devices in Xen
    5. 22 Virtualization: Configuration Options and Settings
    6. 23 Administrative Tasks
    7. 24 XenStore: Configuration Database Shared between Domains
    8. 25 Xen as a High-Availability Virtualization Host
  6. V Managing Virtual Machines with QEMU
    1. 26 QEMU Overview
    2. 27 Setting Up a KVM VM Host Server
    3. 28 Guest Installation
    4. 29 Running Virtual Machines with qemu-system-ARCH
    5. 30 Virtual Machine Administration Using QEMU Monitor
  7. VI Managing Virtual Machines with LXC
    1. 31 Linux Containers
    2. 32 Migration from LXC to libvirt-lxc
  8. Glossary
  9. A Appendix
  10. B XM, XL Toolstacks and Libvirt framework
  11. C GNU Licenses
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3 Introduction to KVM Virtualization Edit source

3.1 Basic Components
3.2 KVM Virtualization Architecture

3.1 Basic Components Edit source

KVM is a full virtualization solution for the AMD64/Intel 64 architecture supporting hardware virtualization.

VM Guests (virtual machines), virtual storage, and virtual networks can be managed with QEMU tools directly, or with the libvirt-based stack. The QEMU tools include qemu-system-ARCH, the QEMU monitor, qemu-img, and qemu-ndb. A libvirt-based stack includes libvirt itself, along with libvirt-based applications such as virsh, virt-manager, virt-install, and virt-viewer.

3.2 KVM Virtualization Architecture Edit source

This full virtualization solution consists of two main components:

  • A set of kernel modules (kvm.ko, kvm-intel.ko, and kvm-amd.ko) that provides the core virtualization infrastructure and processor-specific drivers.

  • A user space program (qemu-system-ARCH) that provides emulation for virtual devices and control mechanisms to manage VM Guests (virtual machines).

The term KVM more properly refers to the kernel level virtualization functionality, but is in practice more commonly used to refer to the user space component.

KVM Virtualization Architecture
Figure 3.1: KVM Virtualization Architecture
Note
Note: Hyper-V Emulation Support

QEMU can provide certain Hyper-V hypercalls for Windows* guests to partly emulate a Hyper-V environment. This can be used to achieve better behavior for Windows* guests that are Hyper-V enabled.

→Chapter 4 Introduction to Linux Containers←Chapter 2 Introduction to Xen Virtualization
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