Astro Bug

CAMPBELL, Calif. - AstroBug -- eRacks Open Source Systems today published the second part of its account of server virtualization: how the company came to KVM, the Kernel-based Virtual Machine, and why it built its own management layer, eVirt, instead of adopting libvirt.

Founder and CTO Joseph Wolff attended the first KVM Forum, held August 29 to 31, 2007, in Tucson, Arizona, six months after KVM entered the mainline Linux kernel in version 2.6.20. The forum opened with Avi Kivity, who began KVM at Qumranet, and closed with Qumranet CEO Benny Schnaider. At the time, the common choice was Xen, a separate hypervisor whose host support lived outside the mainline kernel. KVM made Linux itself the hypervisor, reusing the kernel's scheduler, memory management and drivers. Red Hat acquired Qumranet in September 2008, three months after the second forum in Napa, California.

Wolff also heard Rusty Russell, the author of the Linux packet filters ipchains and iptables, describe iptables as a toolkit for building a product rather than a product itself. That distinction shaped eVirt. Where libvirt wrapped QEMU in a new interface and an XML document per machine, eVirt launched virtual machines from a simple configuration file with sensible defaults, talking to QEMU directly. eRacks has run its own production servers on it since, and its fourth version uses a short YAML file per machine, an Ubuntu cloud image and cloud-init.

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"I went to Tucson expecting to learn more about the kernel and virtualization, and found a technology that was going to replace the hypervisors of its day," said Wolff. "In 2008 libvirt was full of stubs and made it more work to manage a machine than going to QEMU directly, so we built the thin layer instead, and we have used it in production ever since."

eRacks ships virtualization hosts with Ubuntu Server LTS and KVM installed and tested, and the management layer of the customer's choice: libvirt with Cockpit or virt-manager, Proxmox, Incus, IncusOS or XCP-ng. eVirt is available on a consulting basis.

The full post is on the eRacks blog: https://blog.eracks.com/2026/10/how-we-came-to-kvm-tucson-2007-napa-2008-evirt/