I timed a Win7 install with Default NAT network: 3 minutes to reboot.

So something is definitely wrong with your install, and I'm willing to help you figure it out.

that would be a deal breaker


use a different provider
or
install the normal / kvm /hypervisor kernel for your OS


i am not even using a "god" machine
only a 3 year old desktop with a i3 CPU ( 4 single threaded cores)
8 gig ram
and a lowerend nvidia card

2 cores and 4 gig ram are assigned to KVM

from starting the VM to booting and loging in to Debian7
about 30 Seconds (not counting the 15sec. to 30sec. it takes me to type in the very long passwords i use )

debain7 in a VM boots FASTER!!! than the host OpenSUSE13.2

Ya johnvv: that's pretty typical o. My laptop and server, as well. What os is the hypervisor? I thought it was CentOS 6. Isn't a normal CentOS 6 kernel a "kvm kernel"?

This particular server is probably a bad test bed to figure it out given the custom kernel (wish I knew about that before, I would have picked another provider, too late to switch now, it's too much work having to migrate everything and costs a lot as it means paying for two servers for a while till everything is migrated), but every machine I've tried it on which was vanilla CentOS or other OS it was dog slow out of the box using yum to install it. When I'm done migrating stuff off my old core2quad server I will be able to use that server as a test bed. Heck if I can manage to get this to work I may even redo my new production VM server as while ESXi is working great I hate the idea of it being proprietary and the fact that I need a Windows VM just to manage it.

As a start, what optimizations need to be done? This is how I install it more or less:

Maybe a few others but think those are really the only two that I usually install. Anything else I need to install?

After that I then SSH to server with -X flag and start virt-manager to use it via an X session and then attempt to create a VM.

What other steps should I be taking?


I can look at the sosreport but I may as well run that on the test bed once I get it setup, and not this server. May be a while till I can liberate the hardware though as it's production now. Running my email and lot of web apps which may be tricky to migrate. Email tends to be a beast to configure.

Again: I don't know of any required optimizations. All of my installs of KVM, QEMU, and Virt-manager are plain-vanilla. Install, run, done. I don't recall any special optimizations, or changes. I didn't mess with the networking/bridging at all, and I use the .122 network. But I also have 5 other NAT networks on one machine, and I think 3 others ones on my laptop. A bad bridge configuration will give you that macvtap error that you got on that Win2k8 install.

Ping me when you're on a better platform, and hopefully we can figure out what's up. I consistently have results like what I printed earlier and John VV. KVM just works, and that's why it's my first suggestion for folks.

Why? VirtualBox has a full headless mode and can be used without any GUI on your server.
You can use the pure CLI only (https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch08.html#idp55318368), or manage your VMs via the Web-interface provided by phpVirtualBox (http://sourceforge.net/projects/phpvirtualbox/).

Yeah but then the only way to get console access is through VNC which is not exactly secure. I suppose it's not a huge deal for a non shared server (you just use a SSH tunnel and not actually open it to the public) but still feels dirty. You need to keep a list of each VM and what port etc... I still want a management interface where I can pull up a console interface if required. Vbox has a nice management interface but then you can't close the console or the VM shuts down too, OR you go headless and have zero management console. The way they should have made it is that each VM is a separate daemon and the console just connects to it to manage them, or something like that.

Never heard of phpvirtualbox though, it might actually do what I want. I will have to check that out.