Chapter 15. Virtualization Command-Line Tools

This chapter covers common tools used with Linux to run many virtual servers on a single physical server. We cover the two dominant hypervisors used with Linux: Xen and KVM. We also cover libvirt-based tools used to manage both Xen and KVM. Although it isn’t strictly a Linux solution, VMware uses a Linux operating system for the Service Console of their ESX server and recent vSphere products, so we have included basic console commands they provide.

This chapter covers the following topics:

  • Conceptual overview

  • Basic virtualization operations

  • The Xen Hypervisor

  • The KVM Hypervisor

  • The libvirt virtualization API

  • VMware command line interface

We do not provide a tutorial or in-depth information on virtualization here. This is meant as a quick reference to virtualization concepts, commands, and utilities. Refer to the following locations for more in-depth coverage on each of these technologies.

The Xen hypervisor

http://www.xen.org/

The KVM hypervisor

http://www.linux-kvm.org/

libvirt virtualization API

http://libvirt.org/

VMware Documentation

http://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/

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