KVM virtualization on Ubuntu (IV)

This is the last article about KVM virtualization on Ubuntu (I, II, III).

In the first post, I choose as hypervisor localhost (QEMU). If you pick out the other hypervisor available (localhost (QEMU Usermode)) and try to set up a virtual machine, in the last step you will get an error with the following text: "Imposible completar la instalación: «internal error Process exited while reading console log output: char device redirected to /dev/pts/1 qemu: could not open disk image /var/lib/libvirt/images/Ubuntu.img: No such file or directory".




The problem is when you select this hypervisor, the virtual machine is created with your user account, and if you take a look at the permissions on the /var/lib/lubvirt/images directory, you will see that only the root user can write in it.

javi@javi-kubuntu:~$ ls -l /var/lib/libvirt/
total 12
drwxr-xr-x 2 root         root 4096 2010-09-25 00:52 boot
drwxr-xr-x 2 root         root 4096 2010-09-25 00:52 images
drwxr-xr-x 4 libvirt-qemu kvm  4096 2010-12-07 12:28 qemu

The solution consists in changing the directory from root to libvirtd group and adding write permissions.

javi@javi-kubuntu:~$ sudo chown :libvirtd /var/lib/libvirt/images

javi@javi-kubuntu:~$ sudo chmod g+w /var/lib/libvirt/images

Remember that with this sort of connection (localhost (QEMU Usermode)), the storage will be into the /var/lib/libvirt/images directory, but the configuration and log files will reside in the user home.

javi@javi-kubuntu:~$ tree .libvirt/
.libvirt/
├── qemu
│   ├── cache
│   ├── lib
│   ├── log
│   │   └── Ubuntu.log
│   ├── run
│   ├── save
│   ├── snapshot
│   └── Ubuntu.xml
└── storage
├── autostart
│   └── default.xml -> /home/javi/.libvirt/storage/default.xml
└── default.xml

During four articles, we have learnt how to make virtual machines with KVM, libvirt and Virtual Machine Manager. I still have to present several articles related to snapshots, access to hypervisors running on remote machines, types of virtual networks, etc.

KVM is a great option to handle virtual machines. It would be a good idea to carry out some tests in order to meter the performance of different types of hypervisors, such as Xen or VMware.