Virtualization

Virtualization

This page covers virtualization efforts in the context of Fedora.

Introduction

Virtualization allows one to run many guest virtual machines on top of a host operating system such as Fedora. What this means is that using one computer, you can mimic several individual computers and even run different operating systems in each of these virtual machines. There are many different virtualization technologies, including both free and open source software and proprietary offerings. Fedora Core 5 and later include the Xen virtualization code which can do paravirtualization of a modified operating system (OS), or, with hardware support, full virtualization of any native OS. Fedora has also long included QEMU, a fast CPU emulator capable of virtualizing OS on both native and non-native architectures (such as allowing a PowerPC OS to run on x86_64). Yet another type of virtualization is the containers approach used by OpenVZ, which can partition a single OS into several isolated zones -- a chroot with much stronger resource isolation.

Although Xen was the initial focus of virtualization efforts on Fedora, other solutions like KVM have been incorporated into Fedora over time, since they are often complementary and suited to different use cases. Anticipating this diversification of technology, management applications for Fedora have been built on top of the libvirt toolkit, which offers a technology independent API for managing virtual systems.

Development plans

Development is split into a number of different areas:

• Hypervisor Development covers work planned for the Xen Hypervisor over the forthcoming Fedora release(s)
• Xen Development covers work on the Xen kernel and Xen-specific userspace management stack
• Virtualization API Development covers work planned for the generic virtualization management APIs, in particular libvirt
• Virtualization Application Development covers work planned on management applications using libvirt

Resources

• Xen
• Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM)
• OpenVZ
• Linux VServer
• User Mode Linux (UML)
• QEMU
• VM history many interesting documents via Melinda Varian
• VirtualBox
• Mac-on-Linux virtualization solution for PowerPC

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