Re: [tlug] Questions concerning Linux`s KVM

[Alain Hoang <hoanga@example.com>]

Jedidiah Israel wrote:
> Before evaluating KVM, I am interested in learning whether anyone else
> here had any good or bad experiences with it. Including whether if it
> is good enough for production use? Is there one Linux distribution
> that had been working more closely with KVM than others?

	Any distro that has a 2.6.20 kernel will most likely support KVM pretty 
easily.  As far as I know, this is Feisty.  After an apt-get install kvm 
and qemu-tools or something like that I was able to start playing with 
KVM right off the bat.  However, I'd suggest subscribing to the KVM 
developers list as it is still a young project and it's good to observe 
the number of reports on KVM busting in situation X.

	Perhaps RHEL5 supports KVM but if I remember right, it's using a 2.6.19 
kernel which I think works with KVM but I'm not sure how much finagling 
is needed.  Perhaps it's just as simple as modprobe kvm.

	As for KVM itself.  A good working knowledge of using QEMU is really 
helpful in working with KVM as it inherits most of the toolchain from 
QEMU for instantiating images and actually starting up virtual 
instances.  So definitely read up on the QEMU docs as those will help a lot.
	As for using KVM, I've found it so far quite sufficient for doing what 
I need (have a Windows XP image and some Linux images in KVM) however 
for production use, I'm personally putting it under more small-scale 
testing before throwing this out into something that could be deployed 
for a couple of years in a 'production' environment.  It all depends on 
what you consider production ready though.  The other older 
virtualization solutions do have some features that I think KVM lacks 
that might be a deal breaker for your needs.


Alain