KVM is available in RHEL 5.4. I finally managed to find the time to play around it over the weekend. I don’t think it is as matured as xen but having said that, I do agree with the approach – Kernel virtualisation. Redhat is promoting kvm very hard and you can see it from their website and mailing list. If you are using redhat systems, better upgrade to kvm as xen might be phased out soon.
Unlike xen, I found installing kvm abit of pain…. I am willing to share what I know and this is what this blog is for.
Check your cpu before you start because kvm only supports full virtualisation, ie your /proc/cpuinfo must have either the vmx (intel) or the svm (amd) tag.
Next, I suggest you do a minimal clean centos/rhel/fedora installation. After rebooting, log in as root and add packages as needed. We will start with the kvm package.
yum groupinstall kvm
I didnt install the virtualisation package because it will bring in the xen hypervisor and stuffs – don’t want it for now.
The pain with kvm is that it doesnt come with a network bridge (xen wins!). we will need to add one if you want your virtual machine be in the same network as your physical machine. Assuming my network card is eth1:
cd /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ vim ifcfg-eth1
my eth1 config looks like this
# D-Link System Inc RTL8139 Ethernet DEVICE=eth1 ONBOOT=yes HWADDR=00:13:46:3a:14:55 BRIDGE=kvmbr0
now we need to create the kvm bridge
vim ifcfg-kvmbr0
my ifcfg-kvmbr0 looks like this:
DEVICE=kvmbr0 TYPE=Bridge BOOTPROTO=static GATEWAY=10.1.1.254 IPADDR=10.1.1.201 NETMASK=255.255.255.0 ONBOOT=yes
Its now time to restart the network
service network restart
my routing information looks like this
[root@home network-scripts]# route -n Kernel IP routing table Destination Gateway Genmask Flags Metric Ref Use Iface 10.1.1.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.0 U 0 0 0 kvmbr0 192.168.122.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.0 U 0 0 0 virbr0 169.254.0.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.0.0 U 0 0 0 kvmbr0 0.0.0.0 10.1.1.254 0.0.0.0 UG 0 0 0 kvmbr0
If you have firewall turned on, turn them off for the bridge. In /etc/sysctl.conf, add
net.bridge.bridge-nf-call-ip6tables = 0 net.bridge.bridge-nf-call-iptables = 0 net.bridge.bridge-nf-call-arptables = 0
reload sysctl and libvirtd and we are ready to go
sysctl -p /etc/sysctl.conf chkconfig libvirtd on service libvirtd restart
start the virt-manager gui
virt-manager &
I am lazy to post screen shots. Redhat has done a good job already. Just follow the steps in the
redhat kvm guide. Start from Step 3.
If you have selinux running, remember to read the security guide
If you are using lvm as disk, you need to fix the fcontext. My volume group is named as “vm”. So my selinux command is:
semanage fcontext -a -t virt_image_t "/dev/mapper/vm(.*)?"
That’s it for now. Merry Christmas!!
