Documentation Virtualization Beat

Virtualization

Virtualization in Fedora 10 includes major changes, and new features, that continue to support the Xen and KVM platforms.

Unified Kernel Image

The kernel-xen package has been obsoleted by the integration of paravirtualization operations in the upstream kernel. The kernel in Fedora 10 supports booting as a guest domU, but will not function as a dom0 until such support is provided upstream. The most recent Fedora release with dom0 support is Fedora 8.

Booting a Xen domU guest within a Fedora 10 host requires the KVM based xenner. Xenner runs the guest kernel and a small Xen emulator together as a KVM guest.

KVM requires hardware virtualization features in the host system. Systems lacking hardware virtualization will not support Xen guests at this time.

For more information refer to: Features/XenPvops and Features/XenPvopsDom0.

Virtualization Storage Management

Advances in libvirt now provide the ability to list, create, and delete storage volumes on remote hosts. This includes the ability to create raw sparse & non-sparse files in a directory, allocate LVM logical volumes, partition physical disks, and attach to iSCSI targets.

This enables the virt-manager tool to remote provision new guest domains, and manage the storage associated with them. It provides improved SELinux integration, since the APIs will be able to ensure that all storage volumes have the correct SELinux security context when being assigned to a guest.

Features

• List storage volumes in a directory, and allocate new volumes, raw files both sparse and non-sparse, and formats supported by qemu-img (cow, qcow, qcow2, vmdk, etc)
• List partitions in a disk, and allocate new partitions from free space
• Connect to an iSCSI server and list volumes associated with an exported target
• List logical volumes in an LVM volume group, and allocate new LVM logical volumes
• Automatically assign correct SELinux security context label to all volumes when associating with a guest (ie, virt_image_t)

For further details see Features/VirtStorage, libvirt Storage Management, virt-manager Storage Management

Remote Installation of Virtual Machines

Improvements in Virtualization Storage Management have enabled the creation of guests on remote systems. By leveraging Avahi, systems supporting libvirt can be automatically detected by virt-manager. Upon detection, guest can be provisioned on the remote system.

For further details see: Features/VirtRemoteInstall, virt-manager Discovery

Other Improvements

Fedora also includes the following virtualization improvements:

• Utilities in the new virt-mem package provide access to process tables, interface information, dmesg, and uname of a guest from the host system.

libvirt Updated to 0.4.6

New features and improvments since 0.4.2:

• Enhanced OpenVZ support
• Enhanced Linux containers (LXC) support
• Storage pools API
• Improved iSCSI support
• USB device passthrough for QEmu and KVM
• Sound, serial, and parallel device support for QEmu and Xen
• Support for NUMA and vCPU pinning in QEmu
• Unified XML domain and network parsing for all virtualization drivers

For further details see: http://www.libvirt.org/news.html