Tag: KVM

Recently, I explained about qcow2 or QEMU Copy-On-Write v2 and some performance trade-offs for virtual disks. One thing that might alarm you is the appearance of a high percentage reported fragmentation on compressed qcow2 disks. Don’t worry, this isn’t what you probably think! That’s all you really need to know, keep reading if you want […]

I was recently helping someone migrate some virtual machines from VMware to Linux. That is, the virtual machines had been running on top of VMware Workstation, which was running as an application on Windows. The plan was to move the VMs to a Linux platform, taking advantage of the KVM (or Kernel Virtual Machine) support […]

Virtualization usually first enters an organization for economic reasons. Either the cost for buying physical servers, for power and cooling needs, or else for paying the staff needed to maintain full operating systems on independent hardware platforms. Cost is a compelling reason, but there’s more. Also consider your ability to compartmentalize processes to a degree […]

I’ve been writing the last two weeks about Linux virtualization, including how to use Containers and Docker and how to virtualize multiple operating systems on different architectures. We can do many powerful things, but you may be getting worried — how hard is it to control all these widely varying virtualization technologies? There’s good news: […]

Last week I gave you an overview of the spectrum of Linux virtualization technologies, and earlier this week we went deeper with Linux Containers (or LXC) and Docker. Those are adequate solutions for many situations, but what about these: You need to run a different Linux kernel on the virtual machine. The host OS runs […]