Chapter 8. Advanced Guest Virtual Machine Administration
This chapter covers advanced administration tools for fine tuning and controlling system resources as they are made available to guest virtual machines.
8.1. Control Groups (cgroups)
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 provides a new kernel feature: control groups, which are often referred to as cgroups. Cgroups allow you to allocate resources such as CPU time, system memory, network bandwidth, or a combination of these resources among user-defined groups of tasks (processes) running on a system. You can monitor the cgroups you configure, deny cgroups access to certain resources, and even reconfigure your cgroups dynamically on a running system.
The cgroup functionality is fully supported by libvirt. By default, libvirt puts each guest into a separate control group for various controllers (such as memory, cpu, blkio, device).
When a guest is started, it is already in a cgroup. The only configuration that may be required is the setting of policies on the cgroups. Refer to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Resource Management Guide for more information on cgroups.
