Documentation Virtualization Beat

Virtualization

Virtualization in Fedora 10 includes major changes, and new features, that continue to support the Xen and KVM platforms.

Unified Kernel Image

The kernel-xen package has been obsoleted by the integration of paravirtualization operations in the upstream kernel. The kernel in Fedora 10 supports booting as a guest domU, but will not function as a dom0 until such support is provided upstream. The most recent Fedora release with dom0 support is Fedora 8.

Booting a Xen domU guest within a Fedora 10 host requires the KVM based xenner. Xenner runs the guest kernel and a small Xen emulator together as a KVM guest.

KVM requires hardware virtualization features in the host system. Systems lacking hardware virtualization will not support Xen guests at this time.

For more information refer to: Features/XenPvops and Features/XenPvopsDom0.

Improved Storage Management

Previously/ Fedora introduced the ability to manage existing guest domains remotely using libvirt. It was not possible to create new guests due to the lack of storage management capabilities. There is now a new storage management capability that can create and delete storage volumes from a remote host using libvirt.

PolicyKit Integration

Previously, the virt-manager application ran as root when managing a local hypervisor, and used consolehelper to authenticate from a desktop session. Running GTK applications as root is bad practice. PolicyKit integration now permits running virt-manager as a regular user.

Other Improvements

Fedora also includes the following virtualization improvements:

• storage and network paravirtual-drivers for KVM guests
• full support for monitoring network and block statistics of QEMU and KVM in libvirt and virt-top, bringing parity with statistics monitoring, previously only available to Xen guests