Kvm on Chris Irwin

Sharing Host Files With KVM

Tue, 10 Mar 2020 23:06:27 -0400

Adventures with sharing host files with a KVM VM using 9p and libvirt with SELinux.

Discard (TRIM) with KVM Virtual Machines... in 2020!

Mon, 09 Mar 2020 18:10:33 -0400

While checking out some logs and google search analytics, I found that my post about Discard (TRIM) with KVM Virtual Machines has been referenced far more than I expected it to be. I decided to take this opportitnity to fact-check and correct that article.

Discard (TRIM) with KVM Virtual Machines

Sat, 17 Oct 2015 20:19:56 +0000

Update - March 09 2020

Since writing this article, I’ve made a few observations:

More people read this than expected
QEMU has since added discard support to the standard virtio disk, avoiding the need to use virtio-scsi
It kinda sorta works out of the box.

I’ve written a brief followup: Discard (TRIM) with KVM Virtual Machines… in 2020!

Original Article

I’ve got a bunch of KVM virtual machines running at home. They all use sparse qcow2 files as storage, which is nice and space efficient – at least at the beginning.

Fedora cloud for mere mortals

Thu, 15 Jan 2015 03:05:56 +0000

I’ve come across a post by Marek Goldmann detailing the basics of running Fedora cloud images on kvm. I found it was a massive help, but only got me part-way toward what I wanted.

The documentation for cloud-init is sub-par from what I can find, so I thought I’d post this with my own modifications.

My requirements were:

Easy scriptable deployment (Marek’s script got me 100% of this goal)
Static (sequential) IP assignments instead of DHCP
hostname != KVM domain name, making system replacements easier

Additionally, I changed some logic