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

Mon Nov 9 03:41:24 UTC 2009
David McGuffey <davidmcguffey at verizon.net>

On Sun, 2009-11-08 at 14:50 +0100, Mathieu Baudier wrote:
> > 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.
I selected one virtual CPU for the XP load...primarily because I want to
run a couple more VMs and the guidance was to allocate one real CPU per
VM.

So far, I'm very impressed with kvm.  However, I'm getting an SELinux
alert on qemu, and have posted the sealert txt to the selinux-list for
resolution. The VM seems to run ok, but I must do so as root, and not a
regular user. kvm+qemu on CentOS is supposed to be able to be run as a
regular user.  The SELinux alert seems to revolve around the admin type
(or lack thereof). I'm hoping the SELinux gurus can work it out.

In the meantime, I need to figure out how to get the XP VM to access a
usb thumbdrive.


DaveM