You're reading from Mastering KVM Virtualization Design expert data center virtualization solutions with the power of Linux KVM

Product type Paperback

Published in Oct 2020

Publisher Packt

ISBN-13 9781838828714

Length 686 pages

Edition 2nd Edition

Tools

KVM

Concepts

Design

Authors (4):

Humble Devassy Chirammal

Prasad Mukhedkar

Vedran Dakic

Anil Vettathu

View More author details

Table of Contents (22) Chapters

Preface

1. Section 1: KVM Virtualization Basics

2. Chapter 1: Understanding Linux Virtualization FREE CHAPTER

3. Chapter 2: KVM as a Virtualization Solution

4. Section 2: libvirt and ovirt for Virtual Machine Management

5. Chapter 3: Installing KVM Hypervisor, libvirt, and oVirt

6. Chapter 4: Libvirt Networking

7. Chapter 5: Libvirt Storage

8. Chapter 6: Virtual Display Devices and Protocols

9. Chapter 7: Virtual Machines: Installation, Configuration, and Life Cycle Management

10. Chapter 8: Creating and Modifying VM Disks, Templates, and Snapshots

11. Section 3: Automation, Customization, and Orchestration for KVM VMs

12. Chapter 9: Customizing a Virtual Machine with cloud-init

13. Chapter 10: Automated Windows Guest Deployment and Customization

14. Chapter 11: Ansible and Scripting for Orchestration and Automation

15. Section 4: Scalability, Monitoring, Performance Tuning, and Troubleshooting

16. Chapter 12: Scaling Out KVM with OpenStack

17. Chapter 13: Scaling out KVM with AWS

18. Chapter 14: Monitoring the KVM Virtualization Platform

19. Chapter 15: Performance Tuning and Optimization for KVM VMs

20. Chapter 16: Troubleshooting Guidelines for the KVM Platform

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Snapshots

A VM snapshot is a file-based representation of the system state at a particular point in time. The snapshot includes configuration and disk data. With a snapshot, you can revert a VM to a point in time, which means by taking a snapshot of a VM, you preserve its state and can easily revert to it in the future if needed.

Snapshots have many use cases, such as saving a VM's state before a potentially destructive operation. For example, suppose you want to make some changes on your existing web server VM, which is running fine at the moment, but you are not certain if the changes you are planning to make are going to work or will break something. In that case, you can take a snapshot of the VM before doing the intended configuration changes, and if something goes wrong, you can easily revert to the previous working state of the VM by restoring the snapshot.

libvirt supports taking live snapshots. You can take a snapshot of a VM while the guest is running. However...