Chapter 5: Libvirt Storage

This chapter provides you with an insight into the way that KVM uses storage. Specifically, we will cover both storage that's internal to the host where we're running virtual machines and shared storage. Don't let the terminology confuse you here – in virtualization and cloud technologies, the term shared storage means storage space that multiple hypervisors can have access to. As we will explain a bit later, the three most common ways of achieving this are by using block-level, share-level, or object-level storage. We will use NFS as an example of share-level storage, and Internet Small Computer System Interface (iSCSI) and Fiber Channel (FC) as examples of block-level storage. In terms of object-based storage, we will use Ceph. GlusterFS is also commonly used nowadays, so we'll make sure that we cover that, too. To wrap everything up in an easy-to-use and easy-to-manage box, we will discuss some open source projects that might...