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.