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Virtualization Guide › Introduction › Introduction to KVM virtualization
ContentsContents
Virtualization Guide
  1. Preface
  2. I Introduction
    1. 1 Virtualization technology
    2. 2 Virtualization scenarios
    3. 3 Introduction to Xen virtualization
    4. 4 Introduction to KVM virtualization
    5. 5 Virtualization tools
    6. 6 Installation of virtualization components
  3. II Managing virtual machines with libvirt
    1. 7 libvirt daemons
    2. 8 Preparing the VM Host Server
    3. 9 Guest installation
    4. 10 Basic VM Guest management
    5. 11 Connecting and authorizing
    6. 12 Advanced storage topics
    7. 13 Configuring virtual machines with Virtual Machine Manager
    8. 14 Configuring virtual machines with virsh
    9. 15 Xen to KVM migration guide
  4. III Hypervisor-independent features
    1. 16 Disk cache modes
    2. 17 VM Guest clock settings
    3. 18 libguestfs
    4. 19 QEMU guest agent
    5. 20 Software TPM emulator
    6. 21 Creating crash dumps of a VM Guest
  5. IV Managing virtual machines with Xen
    1. 22 Setting up a virtual machine host
    2. 23 Virtual networking
    3. 24 Managing a virtualization environment
    4. 25 Block devices in Xen
    5. 26 Virtualization: configuration options and settings
    6. 27 Administrative tasks
    7. 28 XenStore: configuration database shared between domains
    8. 29 Xen as a high-availability virtualization host
    9. 30 Xen: converting a paravirtual (PV) guest into a fully virtual (FV/HVM) guest
  6. V Managing virtual machines with QEMU
    1. 31 QEMU overview
    2. 32 Setting up a KVM VM Host Server
    3. 33 Guest installation
    4. 34 Running virtual machines with qemu-system-ARCH
    5. 35 Virtual machine administration using QEMU monitor
  7. VI Troubleshooting
    1. 36 Integrated help and package documentation
    2. 37 Gathering system information and logs
  8. Glossary
  9. A Configuring GPU Pass-Through for NVIDIA cards
  10. B GNU licenses
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4 Introduction to KVM virtualization Edit source

4.1 Basic components
4.2 KVM virtualization architecture

4.1 Basic components Edit source

KVM is a full virtualization solution for hardware architectures that support 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.

4.2 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 4.1: KVM virtualization architecture
→Chapter 5 Virtualization tools←Chapter 3 Introduction to Xen virtualization
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