KVM virtualization takes you into the desktop world

It is no exaggeration to say that the number of virtualization tools in the market these days is countless, even Wikipedia can not count. However, KVM stands out, perhaps because it is the only free, non-commercial, open source hypervisor, designed to focus on enterprise-class performance. Although it came out relatively soon, it made great strides-and it may now be time to consider it as a virtualization solution for servers and desktops.

The KVM represents a kernel based virtual machine, which has nothing to do with the KVM (keyboard, monitor and mouse) switcher. The KVM project appears to be somewhat less qualified than most of the major competitors, including VMware hypervisor, VirtualBox, and Xen. It is also different from many other virtualization tools because of its commitment to deep integration with the kernel itself, thus making it theoretically more advantageous in terms of performance than virtual machine management programs that exist primarily in user space.

KVM is certainly not the only free or open source virtualization platform on the market, but it is the only major hypervisor in the Open-source ecosystem that is not associated with a particular business interest group. Xen is also free, open source, but it belongs to Si Jie. Although the VirtualBox code is mostly open, some code is proprietary and belongs to Oracle. VMware is actually a closed source.

Today's KVM

For a long time, KVM has been playing the role of a successor, desperately chasing a longer history, more mature virtualization products. But in recent years it has become popular and now supports a wide range of advanced features, including but not limited to:

• Processor Virtualization Extension

• Virtual machines in Live migration

USB Equipment Direct

• Processor and PCI Hot plug

Desktop Side KVM

KVM developers typically obsessed to optimize the product for servers and large-scale deployment environments, which is significant in the age of cloud computing. However, given the maturity of the product, it may now be time to consider it as a practical desktop virtualization platform scenario.

In itself, KVM is not particularly easy to use. On most Linux distributions, KVM-equipped tools are used only on the command line by default, and the manual configuration of the KVM visitor system is complex and the interface is not intuitive.

However, with the help of tools such as Virt-manager, a KVM virtual machine is built to run Windows, Linux, or other operating systems that serve as a guest system quickly and easily. Here are a few screenshots to prove this:

Admittedly, tools such as VirtualBox are easier to use than Virt-manager by most standards, making it easier to configure advanced features. However, for desktop users with a certain determination, it is not an impossible task to build a KVM visitor system with Virt-manager.

KVM is also a viable virtualization infrastructure for desktop Linux users, which is important because KVM is the only open, full-featured, stand-alone hypervisor for virtual machines on the market. If the Linux distribution decides to focus on KVM, think of it as a tool for both the server and the desktop, which would mean that they would provide out-of-the-box virtualization solutions as part of their standard packages, which would be significant because there is no mainstream desktop operating system ( Whether it's open source or closed source, a built-in, full-featured virtualization tool is included.

Whether or not the KVM is growing rapidly on the desktop, its main role is almost certainly still on the server side. But this does not mean that its importance on the desktop side can be a stroke.