KVM

OpenStack is an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform that allows you to create and manage virtual environments. Chameleon provides an installation of OpenStack Xena using the KVM virtualization technology at the KVM@TACC site. Since the KVM hypervisor is used on this cloud, any virtual machines you upload must be compatible with KVM.

Note

For container-based edge computing on devices such as Raspberry Pis and Jetson Nanos, see CHI@Edge (docs) instead. If you’re unsure whether KVM or Bare Metal Instances is the better fit for your experiment, see the Tips and Tricks post Bare Metal or KVM? Which Should You Choose and When.

This documentation provide basic information about how to use the OpenStack web interface and provides some information specific to using OpenStack KVM on Chameleon. The interface is similar to the bare metal sites, e.g., CHI@TACC and CHI@UC. However, the resources that you are using are virtual, rather than being tied to physical nodes. Familiarity with some concepts, such as Key pairs are also required for KVM.

KVM Topics

• Hardware
• Work with KVM using the GUI
  • Creating leases for VMs
  • Launching instances
  • Managing virtual machine instances
  • Associating a floating IP address
  • Key pairs
  • Security groups
  • Adding a security group to an instance
  • Creating a instance snapshot
  • Launching an instance from a snapshot
• Work with KVM using the CLI
  • Creating a lease and launching an instance
  • Security groups
  • Creating an instance snapshot
  • Uploading qcow2 images to raw format for better instance launch performance
• Load balancer as a service
• Persistent storage via volumes
  • Managing volumes via the GUI
  • Managing volumes via python-chi