[Libvir] QEMU without KVM

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Thu, May 17, 2007 at 04:28:10PM -0400, Steven W. Moyer wrote:
> It didn't abort during initialization ... it aborted when I clicked on 
> the VNC (I'm assuming) window.  In the log file, the error first occurs 
> with the call to hald (which wasn't installed on this system).
>
> Once I installed hal, this problem cleared up (I guess that's one to 
> put in the troubleshooting guide huh?).  The screen grabs work perfectly:)

I think HAL/dbus is already listed in the pre-requisites for install, but
I'll check.

> Now I just need to finish my networking on the host side and I'll be all
> set (any hints?).

Well there are two ways  to do networking

 - Virtual networking - this is the libvirt virbr0 device. It set up
   a bridge device to which guests attach. It provides DNS & DHCP and
   does NAT to whatever your real LAN is. This is nice if you using
   laptops (or other machines with dynamic networking / NetworkManager)
   since it 'just works' if you switch between LAN / WLAN.

 - Shared physical device - this case you have a bridge which has your
   real physical device also enslaved. If a guest connects to this
   bridge, then it has full connectivity to the LAN. Disadvantage is
   that this doesn't play nice with many Wifi cards, or if you switch
   between active devices.

> I'm using the system to test installation scripts.  One of the things 
> that would be very handy is the ability to copy a guest (image file, 
> configuration, etc.).  It could use the same wizard that's used to 
> create a new guest, with everything already filled in (except a couple 
> obvious fields).

Two ideas which may be of interest there...

 - Fujitsu just contributed a additional tool called 'virt-clone'
   which lets you clone a pre-installed system - its config and
   disks, automatically changing things which need to be kept unique
   like UUID, MAC addr, etc.
 - The virt-install tool provides identical capabilities to the
   virt-manager wizard, in a command line tool, so you can easily
   script the kick off of 'from scratch' distro installs.


Regards,
Dan.
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