Virtual Machines
xCAT supports the following virtualization infrastructures:
- Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM):
A full virtualization solution for Enterprise Linux distributions, known as the de facto open source virtualization mechanism and currently used by many software companies.
- IBM PowerKVM:
A product that leverages the Power resilience and performance with the openness of KVM, which provides several advantages:
Higher workload consolidation with processors overcommitment and memory sharing
Dynamic addition and removal of virtual devices
Microthreading scheduling granularity
Integration with IBM PowerVC and OpenStack
Simplified management using open source software
Avoids vendor lock-in
Uses POWER8 hardware features, such as SMT8 and microthreading
The xCAT based KVM solution offers users the ability to:
provision the hypervisor on bare metal nodes
provision virtual machines with the any OS supported in xCAT
migrate virtual machines to different hosts
install copy on write instances of virtual machines
clone virtual machines
This section introduces the steps of management node preparation, hypervisor setup and virtual machine management, and presents some typical problems and solutions on xCAT kvm support.
- Set Up the Management Node for KVM
- Install and Configure Hypervisor
- Manage Virtual Machine (VM)
- Trouble Shooting
- VNC client complains the credentials are not valid
- rpower fails with “Error: internal error Process exited while reading console log qemu: Permission denied”
- rpower fails with “Error: internal error: process exited while connecting to monitor qemu: Permission denied”
- rmigrate fails with “Error: libvirt error code: 38, message: unable to connect to server at ‘c910f05c35:49152’: No route to host.”
- rmigrate fails with “Error: 38, message: failed to create directory ‘<dir-name>’: File exists: Unknown issue libvirt error code.”
- Error: Cannot communicate via libvirt to kvmhost1
- Fail to ping the installed VM