[CentOS] KVM Setup for Win7 Pro on CentOS 5.x

Thu Aug 16 16:36:13 UTC 2012
Bill Campbell <centos at celestial.com>

On Thu, Aug 16, 2012, Arun Khan wrote:
>On Thu, Aug 16, 2012 at 3:04 AM, Bill Campbell <centos at 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
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