25 August 2010

Migrating to KVM

I've begun the process of migrating to the KVM virtualisation technology. I did have some reservations about it initially, because I felt that we should not have to deal with full machine VMs running legacy OSs like Windows and instead new VM technology should be focusing on para-virtualising many copies of GNU/Linux.
But I have been trying out KVM with each new GNU/Linux distribution and finally it is getting good. The speed and technology have always been good but the GUI side was lacking, but it has greatly improved.

On my Fedora 13 x64 system, KVM is very fast at creating brand new VMs. But what to do with my VMs that I have built up on VirtualBox ?

So far I've migrated 3 VMs using a command like this :

$ cd $HOME/.VirtualBox/VDI
$ qemu-img convert CentOS4_32-bit.vdi -O qcow2 CentOS4.qcow2

This will convert the VDI file into qcow2 for use in KVM. I'm sure that they are better ways to do this, but it worked for me for 3 VMs so far.

I miss a few features from VirtualBox, mostly the save current state which saves the VM and closes it all down, like a hibernate. I miss the graphical performance of VirtualBox which is fast. The Shared Folder support is also great.

But KVM is developing rapidly. The performance is great and much faster than any other VM product that I have tried. I can't wait to see how KVM develops in the future.