Managing and monitoring real-time virtual machine performance with Virtual Machine Manager

One solution to this management problem is Virtual http://www.aliyun.com/zixun/aggregation/39569.html ">machine Manager, or called Virt-manager." This article explores the use of Virtual Machine Manager, expounds its capabilities on common hardware, and shows how to manage and monitor the performance of real-time virtual machines.

Although server management has been a problem in the past, virtualization management simplifies some of the problems and magnifies others. The era of a single operating system on a server is in the past and replaced by multiple operating systems in their respective virtual machine (VM) containers. This property, known as virtual secret degree, is useful because fewer servers are needed for more virtual machines than ever before. This leads to less hardware, lower power consumption, but increases administrative complexity.

Fortunately, there are solutions to mitigate the problems with server virtualization, led by Open source solutions. One of the solutions developed by Red Hat is known as Virtual Machine Manager, which simplifies the ability to manage virtual machines (running on critical open source virtual management programs), and provides these virtual machines with the capability to measure their performance and monitor resource utilization.

Hypervisor and Virtual machine management

Virtualization creates new challenges for managing virtual machines, their resources, and the underlying resources of physical hosts. Multiple operating systems now share a physical host's resources in the form of virtual machines, and there is no longer a one-to-one mapping between the operating system and the physical host. Each virtual machine is represented by a container and other metadata that holds one or more virtual disks that are used to describe the configuration and constraints of the virtual machine. Each virtual machine shares the resources of the physical host, which requires not only configuration, but also the utilization of these resources (to ensure that the virtual machines have the right density and the best use of the host, neither straining the available resources nor wasting them).

Virt-manager Management Virtualization Approach

Virtual Machine Manager (Virt-manager) is a lightweight application suite in the form of a command line or graphical user interface (GUI) that manages virtual machines. In addition to providing management capabilities for virtual machines, Virt-manager provides a full graphics console for the Guest virtual machine through an embedded virtual Network Computing (VNC) client viewer.

As an application suite, Virt-manager includes a common set of virtualization management tools. These tools are listed in table 1, including virtual institution creation, cloning, image making, and viewing. The Virsh utility is not part of the Virt-manager package, but it is of great value in itself.

Table 1. Virtualization management applications (including command-line tools)

Virt-manager uses the Libvirt virtualization library to manage the available virtual machine management programs. Libvirt exposes an application programming interface (API) that integrates with a large number of open source virtual machine management programs to achieve control and monitoring. Libvirt provides a daemon called LIBVIRTD to help implement control and monitoring (as shown in a simple stack below).

Figure 1. A simple representation of the Virt-manager stack containing QEMU

Virtual Machine Manager is developed by Red Hat using the Python language to control the lifecycle of the VM, including rationing, virtual network management, statistical data and reporting, and providing simple graphical access to the virtual machine itself.