Xen, QEMU/KVM or Vmware ?

Phil Meyer pmeyer at themeyerfarm.com
Thu Aug 23 16:11:08 UTC 2007


John Lagrue wrote:
> On 22/08/07, Rahul Sundaram <sundaram at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
>   
>> John Lagrue wrote:
>>     
>>> Being quite keen on the concept of virtualisation, I find myself in a
>>> bit of a quandary with F7.
>>>
>>> Being one who needs an uptodate kernel (my laptop power does funny
>>> things with older ones) I can't run Xen because the kernels are too
>>> old. Therefore I have QEMU/KVM or Vmware.
>>>
>>> Though the F7 documents talk lightly about QEMU being all part of the
>>> Virtual Machine Manager, it isn't really; the resulting systems are
>>> slow, refuse to boot off valid ISO images and have no configuration
>>> options for networking. They don't even use the system CDROM until you
>>> specifically add it after the virtual machine is built. So I use
>>> qemu-kvm on the command line; not that the Fedora documents mention
>>> that option - thank heaven for Google!
>>>       
>> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Docs/Fedora7VirtQuickStart is referenced
>> from the docs site.
>>
>> libvirt and associated tools like virsh and virt-manager provide a
>> neutral interface to all underlying VM technologies they support
>> including Qemu, KVM and Xen.
>>
>> Rahul
>>     
>
> They *say* they do, but in actual fact they don't work very well at all.
>
> Try running virsh without Xen and all you get is "error: no valid
> connection" when you try to do anything!
>
> virt-manager works after a fashion, but gives errors galore, crashes
> and a generated guest won't even boot off a valid .ISO file that
> qemu-kvm had no trouble with. Even after using qemu-kvm to install the
> guest, virt-manager still won't work properly. The resulting guest
> won't connect to the external network, the mouse is terribly sticky,
> and the manager refuses to reconnect to a running guest. All-in-all,
> it's a bit of bad news if you're not running Xen.
>
> JDL
>
>   
virt-manager work great without Xen, if:

# yum install kvm

All issues go away if Xen is not installed and kvm is installed.  I 
think its in the doc.

virt-manager ASSUMES the existance of Xen and or kvm.  It should 
probably install kvm as a dependancy, but not everyone needs qemu-kvm.

Good Luck!




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