Posted on Friday, February 01 2008 @ 6:10 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
One of the features that was introduced a year ago into Ubuntu
7.04 "Feisty Fawn" was support for KVM, which is the Kernel-based
Virtual Machine. The Kernel-based Virtual Machine provides full
virtualization support for Linux when running on x86 hardware with
either Intel's VT or AMD-V technology, which means you can run
unmodified guest operating systems such as Linux or Microsoft Windows
within your Linux host operating system. As we had shared in benchmarks,
KVM -- even back to its infancy -- has been quite fast at virtualization
when compared to Xen or kqemu. However, the KVM virtualization support
found in Ubuntu hasn't been the most user-friendly. Installing and then
managing these guest operating systems in Ubuntu 7.04 and Ubuntu 7.10
has required using the command-line interface and thus requiring the
user to be familiar with the various QEMU options. However, in Ubuntu
8.04 this has all changed for the better now that virt-manager and
libvirt are available from the main Ubuntu repository.
Check it out
at Phoronix.
