Hi All,

Having tried this out with a few different distros so far without success I am now thinking of trying either OpenSUSE or Debian. Can someone offer any advice as to which of these might be best suited to use as a virtualization host for KVM?

Summary of known requirements and difficulties encountered so far are:

• Workstation Virtualization - both host partition and VMs all running on same physical machine
• Mixed Windows and Linux guest operating systems
• Access to NTFS partitions on same machine
• Access to Windows network
• Clean basic install for host KVM partition without Browser, Office or other unnecessary accessories and additions
• GUI required as this is for workstation virtualization
• Support for dual-screens on nVidia GPU

Are there any known difficulties or anything in the above which suggests that either OpenSUSE or Debian might not be the most suitable host OS for this purpose?

Thanks,
Nick

I'd go for fedora, with spice/qxl

Tried Fedora 16 without too much success. Had small problems installing it in the first place then found that KVM couldn't import an existing .vhd so gave up with Fedora and now looking elsewhere.

I wondered if being upstream of Redhat Fedora was a bit too much bleeding edge and if I would have any more success with something more stable. Having said that I guess I do want to be using the latest KVM and associated libraries, hopefully there is more chance of things working in later builds than earlier ones.

why should KVM be able to import anything? It's a hypervisor kernel module, not a disk image converter.

Besides, when you create images in proprietary systems, there's no guarantee an open system will be able to use that image. Moreover, MS are known for screwing standards up to break compatibility with anything but their own software.

In theory at least KVM should be able to import hyper-v .vhd images.

you either do not understand what KVM is and how it works, or you have the wrong theory.

In Hyper-V guest operating systems are stored in .vhd files. In KVM these guest OSs can in theory be migrated to KVM guest OS using the 'kvm-img convert' command.

1. you probably mean qemu-img (note - no kvm in there)
2. converting an image and importing it are different things - import means a full scale v2v, where a VM is taken from one system, stripped of that system's specific drivers and agents, and injected with the drivers and agents for the destination hypervisor before it's placed in the destination storage. qemu-img can convert VM images, but it doesn't go into the VM itself, and replace drivers and software installed in the VM.

and again, KVM is not qemu, it uses qemu for some of the tasks.

Did you try the recommendation I made in my reply to your other thread on this same topic?

that sounds like RHEL 6 for a server
contact red hat and buy it .

Actually no, I'd forgotten about your Salix XFCE suggestion.

As Salix is one of the lesser known distros and bearing in mind that I am coming from a Windows world, I wasn't sure if it was suitable. I guessed it might be more Linux command line rather than GUI based which would'nt be idea for a Linux newbie.

Now downloading Salix...

Salix now installed and booting ok. First few items noticed:

1. Dual screens - by default both screens are mirrored, no obvious way that I can see to allow them to work as one big desktop
2. Not able to see Windows Network - is there someting I need to do to enable this
3. No Network connection - which explains the above, where are the network settings
4. No option at install time to install Virtual Machine Manager and other virtualation tools - what do I need to install

CentOS :-)

Network back and working now, it almost seems as if something happened during the Salix install which disabled both NICs, hard reboot (full power off) of both computer and router solved the network problem. However at the moment I still can't see where to get to network settings or how to connect to a windows network.

How about Arch Linux? Any thoughts on CentOS vs Arch as a workstation KVM host.