Virtualization with QEMU, KVM and Libvirt

Day 1

• "Big picture" of the virtualization ecosystem
• History of QEMU development
• CPU features related to virtualization
• Installing QEMU from packages
• Installing QEMU from source
• Full-system emulators
• Using the QEMU console
• Available machine types and peripheral devices
• VirtIO
• Guest drivers
• Disk image formats
• Managing virtual machine snapshots
• Networking in virtual machines
• Graphics adapters
• Audio devices
• Nested virtualization
• User-level emulators
• Registration of foreign binaries through binfmt-misc
• Cross-architecture chroots and containers

Day 2

• The role of Libvirt in the virtualization ecosystem
• Supported hypervisors and container technologies
• QEMU Machine protocol (QMP)
• Running QEMU headless
• QXL video card and SPICE display
• Available SPICE viewers
• Creating virtual machines with "virt-install" and "virt-clone" command-line tools
• Using "virt-manager" graphical application to create and run virtual machines
• Editing virtual machine configuration and libvirt settings with "virsh" low-level tool
• Using libguestfs tools (guestfish, virt-sysprep) to manipulate disk image contents
• Networking and firewall in libvirt
• Accessing libvirt remotely
• Overview of web-based frontends for libvirt
• Highlights from recent KVM-related conferences

Bonus topics available in classroom only (i.e. only short descriptions, not demonstrations, are available in remote courses):

• Running Mac OS X in KVM (if at least one participant has a Mac with Linux installed)
• 3D graphics with VirGL
• 3D graphics with Intel GPU (must be of Broadwell, Skylake or early Kabylake family, i.e. 5th-7th generation, not later) and igvtg, or the equivalent "mediated passthrough" for NVidia Quadro and Tesla cards
• Video card passthrough (if there is a desktop available with two video cards, ideally AMD)
• USB device pass-through