Home > Storage > PowerFlex > White Papers > Using Dell PowerFlex with Linux KVM > Executive summary
KVM stands for kernel-based virtual machine, also known as Linux KVM. It is open-source virtualization that is built into Linux, using the extensions provided by the machine CPUs, both Intel and AMD. These extensions permit the isolation of virtual machine resources. The technology was announced in 2006 and built into the kernel about a year later. At its core, KVM is a hypervisor. A virtual machine in a KVM environment runs as a Linux process that the Linux scheduler schedules. KVM can virtualize all the common hardware components, thus achieving a complete virtualization solution, particularly when paired with an enterprise storage solution like Dell PowerFlex.
KVM offers many of the same features of other hypervisors such as:
Unlike other hypervisors, KVM is an open-source project which permits a business to customize it to their needs.
Although KVM is the same across Linux distributions, how a user manages it varies greatly. There are both UI and CLI interfaces available, some of which are licensed and paid, some of which are open-source and free. Many of the management options focus on hosting companies and thus offer extensive cloud capabilities and support for most hypervisors.
In the solution in this paper, the focus is on demonstrating how to implement KVM at minimal cost. Therefore, a popular open-source management solution that is known as oVirt is used. oVirt is a community project which delivers a management framework consisting of an “oVirt node” that runs the libvirt service and offers web-based management. The heart of the implementation is the oVirt Engine which provides the foundation of the solution.
This paper provides an overview of how to implement PowerFlex storage with KVM using the open-source virtualization management platform oVirt. It details the use of both block and file storage on PowerFlex, and their absorption into the KVM environment.