Installation guide

Dell Inc.

KVM Virtualization in RHEL 6 Made Easy

This is the image file for the VM, the size is specified in GBs.

 --graphics none

This tells the installer not to launch a VNC window to access the VM‟s main console. Instead, it will

use a text console on the VM‟s serial port. If you rather use an X window with graphics to install the

OS on the VM, omit this parameter.

 --location=http://my.server.com/pub/rhel6.1/install-x86_64/

This is the location of the RHEL 6.1 x64 installation directory, which of course will be different for

you. If you don‟t have a remote installation location for the OS, you can install from an iso instead.

Instead of using the location parameter, use the cdrom parameter:

--cdrom /root/RHEL6.1-20110510.1-Server-x86_64-DVD1.iso

 --extra-args="console=tty0 console=ttyS0,115200"

The extra-args parameter is used to pass kernel boot parameters to the OS installer. In this case,

since we are connecting to the VM‟s serial port, we must use the proper kernel parameters to set it

up, just like we would on any server, virtual or not.

The extra-args parameter can also be used to specify a kickstart file for non-interactive

installations. So if we had a kickstart file we would use:

--extra-args="ks=http://my.server.com/pub/ks.cfg console=tty0

console=ttyS0,115200”

The OS installation on the VM proceeds as with a physical server, where you provide information such

as disk partitions, time zone, root password, etc.

Here is another example: Install a RHEL 6.0 x86 VM with 2 VCPUs, 2GB of memory, 15GB disk space,

using the default network (private VM network), install from a local iso on the host and use VNC to

interact with the VM (must have an X server running):

# virt-install \

--name vm1 \

--ram=2048 \

--vcpus=2 \

--disk path=/vm-images/vm1.img,size=15 \

--cdrom /root/RHEL6.0-20100922.1-Server-i386-DVD1.iso

For more information on all virt-install parameters, refer to the virt-install man page.

4. Cloning VMs

If you want several VMs with the same OS and same configuration, I recommend cloning existing VMs

rather than installing the OS on each one, which can quickly become a time-consuming & tedious task.

In this example, we clone vm1 to create a new VM clone called vm1-clone: