Virtual Machines¶
xCAT supports the following virtualization infrastructures:
- Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM):
- A full virtualization solution for Enterprise Linux distributions, known as the de facto open source virtualization mechanism and currently used by many software companies.
- IBM PowerKVM:
A product that leverages the Power resilience and performance with the openness of KVM, which provides several advantages:
- Higher workload consolidation with processors overcommitment and memory sharing
- Dynamic addition and removal of virtual devices
- Microthreading scheduling granularity
- Integration with IBM PowerVC and OpenStack
- Simplified management using open source software
- Avoids vendor lock-in
- Uses POWER8 hardware features, such as SMT8 and microthreading
The xCAT based KVM solution offers users the ability to:
- provision the hypervisor on bare metal nodes
- provision virtual machines with the any OS supported in xCAT
- migrate virtual machines to different hosts
- install copy on write instances of virtual machines
- clone virtual machines
This section introduces the steps of management node preparation, hypervisor setup and virtual machine management, and presents some typical problems and solutions on xCAT kvm support.
- Set Up the Management Node for KVM
- Install and Configure Hypervisor
- Manage Virtual Machine (VM)
- Trouble Shooting
- VNC client complains the credentials are not valid
- rpower fails with “Error: internal error Process exited while reading console log qemu: Permission denied”
- rpower fails with “Error: internal error: process exited while connecting to monitor qemu: Permission denied”
- rmigrate fails with “Error: libvirt error code: 38, message: unable to connect to server at ‘c910f05c35:49152’: No route to host.”
- rmigrate fails with “Error: 38, message: failed to create directory ‘<dir-name>’: File exists: Unknown issue libvirt error code.”
- Error: Cannot communicate via libvirt to kvmhost1
- Fail to ping the installed VM