Skip to main content

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.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Sun USS 7100 foo

TIP: put ALL of your LUNs into a designated TARGET and INITIATOR group when you create them.  If you leave them in the "default" group, then everything that does an discovery against the array will find them :-( I'm struggling to recognize a reason that a default should even be present on the array. Also - who, exactly, is Sun trying to kid.  The USS is simply a box.. running Solaris .. with IPMP and ZFS.  Great.  If you have ever attempted to "break-in" or "p0wn" your IBM HMC, you know that there are people out there that can harden a box - then.. there's Sun.  After a recent meltdown at the office I had to get quite intimate with my USS 7110 and learned quite a bit.  Namely: there's a shell ;-) My current irritation is how they attempt to "warn you" away from using the shell (my coverage expired a long time ago to worry about that) and then how they try to hide things, poorly. I was curious as to what version of SunOS it ...
1 comment
Read more

P2V using dd for KVM-QEMU guest

Preface: I have certainly not exhaustively tested this process.  I had a specific need and found a specific solution that worked. Situation:  I was issued a shiny new laptop running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 (with Corp VPN, certs, Authentication configuration, etc...)  The image was great, but I needed more flexibility on my bare metal.  So, my goal was to P2V the corporate image so I could just run it as a VM. * Remove corporate drive and install new SSD * install corp drive in external USB-3 case * Install RHEL 7 on new SSD * dd old drive to a disk-image file in a temp location which will be an image which is the same size as your actual drive (unless you have enough space in your destination to contain a temp and converted image) * convert the raw disk-image to a qcow file while pushing it to the final location - this step should reduce the disk size - however, I believe it will only reduce/collapse zero-byte blocks (not just free space - i.e. if you de...
1 comment
Read more

"Error getting authority: Error initializing authority: Could not connect: No such file or directory (g-io-error-quark, 1)"

"Error getting authority: Error initializing authority: Could not connect: No such file or directory (g-io-error-quark, 1)" One issue that may cause this to arise is if you managed to break your /etc/fstab We had an engineer add a line with the intended options of "nfsvers=3" but instead added "-onfsvers=3" and it broke the system fairly catastrophically.
Post a Comment
Read more