Pawan Sharma | July 18, 2013 | Be the first to comment!

Creating KVM Virtual Machines in RHEL6.

In this post we will discuss about packages required for KVM (Virtualization), creation of KVM virtual machine and managing those virtual machines. KVM can run multiple windows and Linux guest operating system. KVM virtualization is only available for 64 bits machines. You can’t use KVM virtualization on 34 bit architecture machines.

You can install KVM virtualization environment at the time of RHEL6 installation by selecting virtual host packages. Or on currently installed RHEL6 server, you can install packages using yum. For full KVM virtualization host you will require virt-manager, libvirt libvirt-python, python-virtinst, libvirt-client.


# yum install –y virt-manager libvirt libvirt-python python-virtinst libvirt-client

If you don’t have yum server, you can configure it by following easy steps mentioned in this post.

After installing KVM packages you can now create new virtual machines using virt-install command or using virt-manager GUI.

1. Start libvirtd daemon to start KVM virtualization.

# /etc/init.d/libvirtd start
# chkconfig libvirtd on

2. Open Applications --> System Tools --> Virtual Machine Manager. Or run virt-manager command as root user. Click on create new virtual machine button.

 

3. Give name to virtual machine and select installation media option.


4. In this example we have selected ISO image as our installation media.


5. Define RAM and CPU for the KVM virtual machine.


6. Define disk size.


7. Select network options (Bridge or NAT) as per your requirements and click finish.


8. Install RHEL on the created KVM virtual guest.


For RHEL installation steps follow this post.
In next post we will discuss about command line tools for administering KVM virtual machines.
Please comment if you have any questions.

No comments:

Post a Comment