Virtualisation
From Realm Business Systems Ltd
Virtualization is the process of creating several virtual machines (VMs) from one physical machine using software called a hypervisor.
- The virtual machines act and perform just like physical machines, sharing the physical machine’s computing resources.
- With virtualization you can run multiple servers, desktops, operating systems and networks within the same physical machine.
- KVM (for Kernel-based Virtual Machine) is a full virtualization solution for Linux on x86 hardware containing virtualization extensions.
- Using KVM, one can run multiple virtual machines running unmodified Linux or Windows images.
- Each virtual machine has private virtualized hardware: Network, disk, graphics, etc.
- The kernel component of KVM is included in mainline Linux, as of 2.6.20., the userspace component of KVM is included in mainline QEMU, as of 1.3.
- QEMU is a free and open-source hosted hypervisor that performs hardware virtualization.
- LIBVIRT is an open-source API, daemon and management tool for managing platform virtualization.
- It can be used to manage KVM, Xen, VMware ESX, QEMU and other virtualization technologies.
- These APIs are widely used in the orchestration layer of hypervisors in the development of a cloud-based solution.
- VIRT-MANAGER application is a desktop user interface for managing virtual machines through libvirt.
KVM + LIBVIRT + QEMU + VIRT-MANAGER are free and open source – there are no limitations and you can inspect, integrate, extend and modify however you want.
