“One of the features that was introduced a year ago into Ubuntu
7.04 ‘Feisty Fawn’ was support for KVM, which is the Kernel-based
Virtual Machine. The Kernel-based Virtual Machine provides full
virtualization support for Linux when running on x86 hardware with
either Intel’s VT or AMD-V technology, which means you can run
unmodified guest operating systems such as Linux or Microsoft
Windows within your Linux host operating system. As we had shared
in benchmarks, KVM–even back to its infancy–has been quite fast
at virtualization when compared to Xen or kqemu. However, the KVM
virtualization support found in Ubuntu hasn’t been the most
user-friendly. Installing and then managing these guest operating
systems in Ubuntu 7.04 and Ubuntu 7.10 has required using the
command-line interface and thus requiring the user to be familiar
with the various QEMU options. However, in Ubuntu 8.04 this has all
changed for the better now that virt-manager and libvirt are
available from the main Ubuntu repository.