Ubuntu Unleashed 2013 Edition: Covering 12.10 and 13.04, Eighth Edition

KVM

The Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) is a part of the Linux kernel. KVM does not perform hardware emulation, but only provides the lower-level tasks. It needs a second layer to run in user space. This is much faster than running the entire virtualization process in user space, on top of another operating system. KVM is designed for use on processors that have either the VT-x or AMD-V extension enabled. Managing VMs with KVM in Ubuntu is accomplished using libvert and QEMU. You can check whether a system has the extensions enabled by installing and running the kvm-ok package. It is a simple command-line tool that exits with output 0 if the system is suitable or non-0 if not.

Start by installing the following packages from the Ubuntu software ...