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Installing Windows 7 x64 on KVM (QEMU)

VMware Workstation 8 has been somewhat of a challenge for me on my current laptop using Fedora 16 x86_64.  Installing 8.0.0 required some hand-built patch that someone published, and 8.0.1 seems to lock up my display manager to the point where CTRL-ALT-Backspace is the only way out of the situation (followed by forcefully taking ownership of the VM, etc..)

I decided to see if KVM would work any better.  It was no love-fest either.  But, it is working and free... ;-)

I created an LVM volume and mounted it as /var/lib/libvirt prior to installing the Virtualization packages via yum.  Using the Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) I created the Windows 7 VM and essentially left all the defaults.  I was unable to get the floppy added to my machine and subsequently added a 2nd CD-ROM to install the VirtIO drivers during the install.

Some items I found to be positives:

  • The virbr0 (NAT) network was able to utilize my wireless or my Ethernet connection, without ANY intervention on my part.  That is really quite awesome.  I don't recall that being the case previously.
  • The VMM GUI is actually fairly decent.
  • The Windows client installation was reasonably painless.
Some items I feel need improvement:
  • I found conflicting documentation/blogs/etc.. (mostly due to my lack of knowledge on the product) regarding the different types of Virtualization and when/why you would chose one over the other.  VMware workstation seems rather straight-forward as you simply install the product (in theory) and build your Guest OS, then install the VMware Tools.  There really were no choices.  As opposed to KVM/libvirt which I wasn't sure if I should use VirtIO, SCSI, etc... and if I did choose to go one direction, or the other, how did that impact what I was trying to accomplish.

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