Fedora 10-beta Virtualization

It seems I am the first person on Earth to ever work with Fedora 10's virtualization technology (and Kickstart, too, which is totally FUBAR.) If you don't believe I'm the only person using it, try to search out a HowTo. So where are the HowTo's? Seems we are on our own while F10 is rawhide. At issue is the fact the Red Hat Virtualization has had to be completely redesigned, as evident by its removal from F9.

So how do we use this puppy? Let's find out:

The first thing you may notice is the lack of a Xen kernel. The good new is that we just install and select the Virtualization group. The bad news is that instead of a traditional hypervisor, we now have more of a virtualization engine. Among other things, this means no para-virtualization, and we must have VMX/SVM CPUs Once the system is up, we start virt-manager.

First, we connect to the virtualization engine (I'm going to coin the new term VE) by clicking File / Add Connection. Choose QEMU and Local, click Connect. Don't bother trying to connect to Xen.

I think one of the most complicated parts of this is going to be getting the network on line. First thing I noticed was that it was bridged to the 192.168.122.0 subnet. The easiest way to fix this is to right click the qemu connection and select Details. On the Virtual Networks tab, click the + symbol at the lower left. Walk through the wizard using the same subnet as one of your physical network cards. Initially this will provide a NAT'ed outbound only connection.

Back at virt-manager, click New, and walk through the VM creation wizard. Click Finish, and... Son Of A Bitch! It worked. The first time! It worked. I can't believe it! It worked.

Just for fun, lets hit the command line:

# virsh list
Id Name State
----------------------------------
2 Virgil running

Slightly different than what I'm use to. Notice the xm command is gone (remember Xen is a naughty word now.) Needless to say it will take some time to figure out the new commands, but virsh has always been in the background, so it shouldn't be too difficult.