Setting up a virtual machine server

I'm sure many of you have already used a virtualization solution before. In fact, I bet a great many readers are following along with this book while using a virtual machine running in a solution such as VirtualBox, Parallels, VMware, or one of the others. In this section, we'll see how to use an Ubuntu Server in place of those solutions. While there's certainly nothing wrong with solutions such as VirtualBox, Ubuntu has virtualization built right in, in the form of a dynamic duo consisting of Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) and Quick Emulator (QEMU), which together form a virtualization suite that enables Ubuntu (and Linux in general) to run virtual machines without the need for a third-party solution. KVM is built right into the Linux kernel, and handles the low-level instructions needed to separate tasks between a host and...