> 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.