Virtualization Made Easy In Ubuntu 8.04

One of the features that was introduced a year ago into Ubuntu 7.04 “Feisty Fawn” was support for KVM, which is the Kernel-based Virtual Machine. The Kernel-based Virtual Machine provides full virtualization support for Linux when running on x86 hardware with either Intel’s VT or AMD-V technology, which means you can run unmodified guest operating systems such as Linux or Microsoft Windows within your Linux host operating system. As we had shared in benchmarks, KVM — even back to its infancy — has been quite fast at virtualization when compared to Xen or kqemu. However, the KVM virtualization support found in Ubuntu hasn’t been the most user-friendly. Installing and then managing these guest operating systems in Ubuntu 7.04 and Ubuntu 7.10 has required using the command-line interface and thus requiring the user to be familiar with the various QEMU options. However, in Ubuntu 8.04 this has all changed for the better now that virt-manager and libvirt are available from the main Ubuntu repository.