On Thu, Aug 16, 2012, Arun Khan wrote:
On Thu, Aug 16, 2012 at 3:04 AM, Bill Campbell centos@celestial.com wrote:
Can somebody point me to a HowTO or other documentation describing the tools available under the CentOS 5 KVM package to create and manage a Windows 7 Pro VM? All my VM experience to date has been the old free VMware Server.
Assuming you have hardware acceleration and 64 bit version installed, look for the virt-manager package.
Thanks. I found that after doing some poking around. I'll be in my normal 'learn by destroying' mode this afternoon (apologies to Jeff Lieberman of learnbydestroying.com :-).
The interface is very similar to virtual box.
I've never used that, only VMware so far.
I need to:
- Create the VM instance allowing for about 50GB total disk space which will be either a single image partitioned into two Windows 'Drives' for the OS and applications/data, or two images.
The default location for the hard disk image file is under /var/lib path. This can be changed to point to a different location if you are planning many such large installation. An alternate method could be to define a file or a LVM and then tell virt-manager the location of this file/LVM volume.
Thanks for that info. It looks like everything is under /var/lib/libvrt.
I assume that I can replace /var/lib/libvirt/images with a symlink to another file system with adequate space.
Would it be safe to symlink the entire /var/lib/libvrt directory to another file system? I just tried 'lsof /var/lib/libvirt' on the system with no VMs and the libvrtd service running, and it doesn't show anything using it at idle.
- Install Windows 7 from an OEM System Builder Pack, either using the CD/DVD drive on the Linux server or from an image created with 'dd' from the Win7 media.
Any x86 OS can be installed. Choose a NIC like Realtek or Intel Pro, drivers for which should be recognizable by the Windows installer.
- Set up network bridging on the private LAN so that the Windows system is accessible via OpenVPN connections from the outside world and by users on the LAN to run a client/server accounting application.
I have done KVM VLANs but I am not sure if it can be done from the virt-manager. Experiment and see how far you can go.
I will be digging into this later today. So far I've found the file /var/lib/libvirt/network/default.xml and see a vibr0 interface defined.
The documentation I found yesterday described setting up briding, but hopefully virt-manager has a nicer way to do it.
Bill