KVM: Virtualising Servers

Tonight at LOGIN the topic is Virtualisation. I’ve spent the last week playing with KVM to virtualise some of our servers at work. So the meeting topic will be interesting from the point of view of comparing technologies to that end. However, I have also been asked to briefly discus KVM.

KVM is essentially comprised of two components. A Linux kernel module, more on this later, and a userspace application that uses the kernel module to provide a virtual machine. The userspace application is a fork of QEMU. I would actually suggest KVM’s QEMU and the real QEMU are parallel developments of QEMU; and not a literal fork. Yet.

At work we had 7 servers all running with (on average) under 10% utilisation. Needless to say that is chewing through power and hardware in ways that we don’t need to as a NFP. Anyway we recently got two new servers so I’ve been virtualising the 7 down to 2. I’ll post the write up I’m preparing for LOGIN when it’s done which will details the howto information.