[CentOS] Virtualization software to install Windows as guest on CentOS 5 as host ?

[Chan Chung Hang Christopher]

Sergej Kandyla wrote:
> Christopher Chan wrote:
>> On Thursday, February 04, 2010 03:48 PM, Hadi Motamedi wrote:
>>   
>>> Dear All
>>> I need to install Windows as guest on my CentOS 5 as host . Can you
>>> please give me the link to download the requierd rpm package for this
>>> purpose ?
>>> Thank you
>>>     
>> yum install kvm
>>
>> Then search for virtio drivers. Redhat provides virtio block drivers for 
>> Windows Vista, 7, 2008.
>>   
> What benefits may provide me the virtio drivers ?

They make use of the paravirtualized virtio framework which is orders of 
magnitude faster than fully virtualized i/o.


> Also what suggestions do you have about running  win2k3, win2k8 server 
> as a guests on CentOS5 kvm host ?

Well, somebody said use AMD cpus because they are more stable but I have 
never managed to get that validated.


> I'm interesting about disk organization for guest OS at first.


If you need performance, you need paravirtualized i/o. With a kvm 
solution, that means going through virtio. I think Xen has its own 
solution to this and other than this, I know nothing about vmware and 
virtualbox on this score.