[CentOS] Virtualization option at first install CentOS-5.4 x86_64

[Mathieu Baudier]

> I've been doing a lot of research on virtualization (VMWare, EXSi, xen,
> kvm, VirtualBox, etc.) and ended up choosing kvm.  I'm very surprised at
> how quick I was able to bring up a WinXP VM.
>

# FUTURE OF KVM
David, I'm currently doing exactly the same (researching and comparing
various virtualization technologies) and I agree that it seems the way
to go in the future.

Only "problem" is that virt-manager is pretty hard to use and lacks a
lot of features which would be practical. It is better though when
using the one in Fedora, connecting to a CentOS box running
libvirtd+KVM.
What esp. lacks in the virt-manager distributed with CentOS 5.4 is the
remote management of storage pools. I guess that the upstream vendor
want to keep its proprietary Virtualization Server product
attractive... (which is in itself a guarantee that they will keep
investing in KVM, see: http://www.redhat.com/v/swf/rhev/demo.html)

# WIN XP UNDER QEMU+KVM
Regarding running Windows XP, I just wanted to share the following
with the list:
- when installing Windows XP through virt-manager, if one chooses
'Windows XP' as OS type and chooses more than 1 virtual CPU, some or
all of the physical CPUs are used to 100% and the guest is very slow
- this seems to be due to a problem where ACPI is not properly
activated: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/virt-manager/+bug/228442
- the solution is to install it as 'Windows Vista': in that case this
is indeed extremely fast, and actually I do not have the pb described
in the link above that it cannot shutdown.

I'm gathering experience around KVM and I'll probably try to
contribute it to the CentOS Wiki when it is more consolidated.