After using the free version of VMWare server for the past few years, my work is thinking of transitioning to KVM. Right now I'm just getting started with it.

It's been easy enough and quick enough to create linux VMs, but I just tried my first windows one.

When installing Windows XP, my VM keeps hanging during the "Installing Network" phase. Not lock-up hanging, just spinning in place and never getting past it.

Anyone know how to get around this? Fix this?

Thanks
--Kyle

Here is what was posted on another BB.
=======
Hi djcaseley,

Thanks for the info.
Disabling the onboard LAN card in BIOS done the trick for me...

Regards
Chandu

"djcaseley" wrote:

>
> I saw this just last week. If this is onboard, disable it in the BIOS,
> and install. If its a PCI card, remove it and install.
> Re-enable/replace the NIC once you've completed the install. If this
> doesn't help, remember that onboard firewire is counted as a NIC by
> Windows XP.
>
>
> --
> djcaseley

I'm sorry if this post sounds like a troll...

If you find that KVM isn't doing what you want but you are in a pinch to get something working, I'd recommend using VMWare Workstation instead. It's considerably more powerful than KVM and has Unity mode, which is absolutely amazing. It costs money, but it's well worth it. Occasionally VMWare has Promos on, so sometimes you can get it at a discount.

That's assuming that you want to run VM's on a workstation instead of a dedicated server. If you want to run VM's on a dedicated server there are much better solutions out there.

If the management is thinking about switching to KVM due to performance issues with VMWare Server, then perhaps you need to stand back and rethink how you are satisfying your Virtual Machine requirements. In this case, I don't think KVM will perform any better due to OS overhead.

In my case, I was using VMWare server as a low-speed test environment, but when I needed higher end performance, I used VMWare ESXi instead on a dedicated server. It's like night and day.

In the meanwhile, I would file a bug with the KVM team as this sounds like abnormal behavior.

Good luck!

What distribution/kernel version, what version of KVM?

There was an issue with KVM on Ubuntu 9.04 in which certain OSes would not work properly, similarly to what you are describing, but this was resolved in 9.10. Bugs were reported to the RH KVM team.

XP works great on KVM, I have experience hundreds of XP guests running.

You need to gather more info, and open a BZ ticket for this

I'm intending it to be run on a server not a desktop (but I do run vmware-server on my desktop currently, which I'd like to get away from).


The reason for looking away from vmware isn't performance (although more performance helps the argument). It's two other things.

The fact is, VMware could decide to cancel the free versions (server 2.x and esxi) at any time. I know they probably wont, but they could, which makes me want to know how to move VMs from one system to the other.

The more important thing, for me at least, is that I think VMware is on it's way out. Businesses have gotten pretty comfortable with VM technology, and I think within the next few years OSes will come with a built-in VM layer. When that happens, VMware goes the way of Borland. Not dead, but a niche player with a fraction of the market share it once hand. I'd rather be prepared for what I think is coming.

Duhh, forgot to post the important part.

Sending it a ctrl-alt-del did it.

I did it out of desperation, I was going to try again from scratch before removing the LAN & sound. Funny, but it popped right past whatever was holding it up, and finished installing.