Optimizing VM Images for OpenStack with KVM/QEMU Fall 2013

OpenStack and KVM/QEMU support a cornucopia of image and disk formats. With so many options it can be difficult to understand all the various trade-offs of these formats.

We will explore some of the more common image formats and disk formats and their trade-offs, tips and tricks for converting image formats, and working with these images directly. We will dive into how nova, libvirt, and KVM interact with these formats when performing operations such as snapshotting and image resizing. We will look at best practices for configuring the guest operating systems such as login credentials, network configuration, and device/performance optimization.

As the Senior Director of Engineering and part of Metacloud’s founding team, Chet Burgess is responsible for system design and ensuring that Metacloud solutions are always available, redundant, and scalable.

Chet’s career in technology began at age 16 when he worked at a VAR building small business networks. Since then he has held a number of positions including Director of Enterprise Unix Systems at the University of Southern California, and Senior Systems Architect at Ticketmaster Entertainment.

Chet is a contributor to the OpenStack Nova project. His passion is working on availability and scalability problems in large-scale systems deployments.

Brian Wellman is the Director of Systems Operations at Metacloud. He is responsible for the implementation, operation, support, and monitoring of Metacloud’s client deployments as well as Metacloud’s internal infrastructure. He has 16 years of experience in designing, implementing, and operating highly available, large scale server deployments and private clouds.

Prior to joining the Metacloud team in 2012, Brian held the role of Director of Web Systems at Ticketmaster Entertainment. His team managed an infrastructure that consisted of thousands of nodes spread across several datacenters worldwide and was responsible for the implementation and operation of Ticketmaster's first private cloud.