Configuring Nova-compute with KVM Hypervisor

Kernel-based virtual machine (KVM) is the most common and robust open source virtualization Hypervisor, and it is most commonly used with OpenStack. In this recipe, we will configure the Nova-compute service to use the KVM Hypervisor driver, which invokes libvirt service commands to control KVM virtual machines on the host running the Nova-compute service.

Getting ready

Before configuring Nova-compute to use KVM, make sure that hardware-assisted virtualization is enabled, and a virtualization flag is present at /proc/cpuinfo. Check whether amd-v or intel-vt is supported:

[root@compute1 ~]# grep -E 'svm|vmx' /proc/cpuinfo

If the preceding command returns 0, make sure that virtualization is enabled at BIOS.

How to do it…

After verifying that KVM is supported, follow these steps to configure Nova-compute with the KVM hypervisor driver:

1. Install the kvm and libvirt packages:

   [root@compute1 ~]# yum install qemu-kvm libvirt libvirt-python libguestfs-tools...