In today’s guide we will be installing KVM on CentOS Stream 8 Linux operating system. KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) is an open source virtualization technology built into Linux Kernel. KVM can be used on any x86 hardware with virtualization extensions (Intel VT or AMD-V). The role of KVM as hypervisor is specification of the host resources – Memory, CPUs, and virtual devices availed to the virtual machine instances being defined.
KVM consists of a loadable kernel module, kvm.ko, that provides the core virtualization infrastructure and a processor specific module, kvm-intel.ko or kvm-amd.ko. Below diagram illustrates how the KVM hypervisor virtualizes the compute resources for Linux on KVM.
Step 1: Confirm Virtualization extensions availability
Your hardware needs to have CPU virtualization extensions; Intel VT for Intel or AMD-V for AMD processor. In some systems, this is disabled on BIOS and you may need to enable it.