Prerequisites and considerations

I’m sure many of you have already used a virtualization solution before. In fact, I bet a great many readers are following along with this book while using a Virtual Machine (VM) running in a solution such as VirtualBox, Parallels, VMware, or one of the others. Those applications and others like them are great for testing Ubuntu or other operating systems on your desktop or laptop. In this section, we’ll set up a VM server that can act as a centrally available server on which to run VMs.

This will be easier than you may think—Ubuntu has virtualization built right in. This comes in the form of a dynamic duo consisting of Kernel-based VM (KVM) and Quick Emulator (QEMU), which together form a virtualization suite that enables Ubuntu (and Linux in general) to run VMs without the need for a third-party solution. KVM is the feature that is built right into the Linux kernel that performs the magic under the hood. It handles the low...