We have been looking forward for a replacement of Virtualbox OSE . This thing started our quest for finding a Virtualization application to fulfill the needs with an easy-to-use procedure. We found KVM in Add/remove while we were looking for something alike YaVM – Yet another Virtual Machine (An application developed for openSUSE in 2006 to serve as basic virtual machine that comes with the os preinstalled). Xen , the geeky Virtual machine by SUSE linux enterprise is a virtualization powerhouse. While Xen offers quite complex procedure requiring you to boot a patched Xen kernel to create and run a Virtual machine – KVM is a loadable module which runs with the OS’s default kernel module. The only thing it requires is that your processor should have the architecture to support visualization .
For this type:
kvm
in the terminal and see the result:
QEMU PC emulator version 0.9.1 (kvm-84), Copyright (c) 2003-2008 Fabrice Bellard
usage: qemu [options] [disk_image]
If you see the above message, then you should be smiling as you are green to go for virtualization with your hardware.
But if your CPU does not, in fact support Hardware virtuallization, you will get output such as the following:
$ kvm
Could not initialize KVM, will disable KVM support
Ubuntu does not support running KVM without hardware acceleration. Sorry.
So lets start our work with Virtualization weapons at hand. First, head on over to the KVM HOME PAGE
Best feature of KVM is that it is part of the OS and is not dependent upon a 3rd party vendor . Also, it’s very easy to maintain as you update your system, and load new kernel revisions, as the module will not break like VirtualBox and VMware solutions would. Also, it’s far less problematic to manage than Xen, which is entirely unsuitable for a desktop system IMO . KVM really is more of a direct competitor to Xen than to a workstation solution like VirtualBox or VMware workstation, and has some very powerful features, I will never tap into here on my home system. By design however, it’s far less intrusive on a standard Linux desktop than Xen.
Now we have our kernel module working properly and rest everything in place so must get back to business . I will use Kubuntu for the testing purpose coz its my personnel favourite and it very light too.
Follow these steps to set up your virtual Machine :-
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