One of the big reasons I moved to the new Ubuntu LTS for my main server was to get the new packages for KVM. To my disappointment, the versions that ship with 10.04 are slightly antiquated, especially with the amount of changes that are happening in the KVM development society. I found this PPA maintained by Daniel Baumann had everything that I needed. He keep is quite up to date and resolves build problems quickly. I don’t recommend you to use this PPA for production systems, I use it for my personal system and try to give any support to Daniel that I can because it really helps me out that he is packaging/maintaining this for the bleeding edge KVM packages.
KVM is a really great piece of virtualization software that is up and coming in the linux world, in the last several months the graphical (newbie) tools have become very simple to use. These tools still lag behind other solutions for virtualization such as VirtualBox or Vmware products, however KVMs performance and developmental activity make it a likely candidate for people setting up virtualization servers for personal and enterprise use.
Before we begin let me explain my set-up. I have a server that will be running the qemu-kvm software with libvirt that I will administer from my laptop running virt-manager. You can use KVM and Virt-Manager all while on the same machine without issue, but this guide is written for my particular configuration. I assume before beginning that you are running a pretty vanilla machine and will not have any strange configurations that would conflict with a standard Ubuntu 10.04 install. (more…)