KVM, la Kernel-based Virtual Machine, fornisce a Linux un pieno supporto alla virtualizzazione su macchine con processori x86 dotati delle tecnologie Intel VT o AMD-V. È quindi possibile eseguire diversi sistemi operativi (sia Microsoft che Linux), all’interno del sistema operativo ospitante come se si trattasse di computer fisicamente distinti.
Il supporto a KVM è stato introdotto un anno fa con la Ubuntu 7.04 ma è a partire dalla prossima versione, la 8.04 LTS, che con l’arrivo delle librerie libvirt dotate della GUI virt-manager, sarà possibile sfruttare KVM in maniera decisamente più user friendly.
Per chi è interessato all’argomento, segnalo l’intervista a Soren Hansen, programmatore della Canonical specialista per le tecnologie di virtualizzazione, rilasciata per la newsletter Ubuntu Weekly #76.
Ecco un breve estratto:
Question: Who are you?
Reply: My name is Soren Hansen, I’m 26, and I work for Canonical as virtualization specialist on the Ubuntu server team.
Question: When and why did virtualization become a priority for the server team?
Reply: Virtualization has been on our agenda for a long time, but it became a top priority at UDS (Ubuntu Developer Summit) in November. We could see that demand for it was growing and we took a look at the options available (KVM, Xen, OpenVZ, QEmu+kqemu, Virtual“Box, etc.) and we found that KVM was the best fit for us right now and went with it.
Question: What is virtualization and KVM exactly? How will users be impacted?
Reply:Well, for the Hardy Heron release, we’ve really picked up the virtualization ball. Virtualization is making its way into data centres and onto developer workstations everywhere. Even “regular” users are using it to run Ubuntu on Mac OS X all the time.
We’ve chosen to settle on KVM as our main virtualization focus. KVM is a special version of QEMU which utilizes the new virtualization extensions that both Intel and AMD have added to their newest CPU models. [continua]
Per chi vuole dare un’occhiata all’interfaccia grafica di configurazione del virt-manager, c’è un interessante articolo pubblicato su Phoronix: Virtualization Made Easy In Ubuntu 8.04, corredato di parecchi screenshot.
