Chapter 2. Virtualized guest installation overview

2.1. Creating guests with virt-install
2.2. Creating guests with virt-manager
2.3. Installing guests with PXE

After you have installed the virtualization packages on the host system you can create guest operating systems. This chapter describes the general processes for installing guest operating systems on virtual machines. You can create guests using the New button in virt-manager or use the command line interface virt-install. Both methods are covered by this chapter.

Detailed installation instructions are available for specific versions of Fedora, other Linux distributions, Solaris and Windows. Refer to Chapter 3, Guest operating system installation procedures for those procedures.

2.1. Creating guests with virt-install

You can use the virt-install command to create virtualized guests from the command line. virt-install is used either interactively or as part of a script to automate the creation of virtual machines. Using virt-install with Kickstart files allows for unattended installation of virtual machines.

The virt-install tool provides a number of options one can pass on the command line. To see a complete list of options run:

$ virt-install --help

The virt-install man page also documents each command option and important variables.

qemu-img is a related command which may be used before virt-install to configure storage options.

An important option is the --vnc option which opens a graphical window for the guest's installation.

This example creates a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 guest, named rhel3support, from a CD-ROM, with virtual networking and with a 5 GB file-based block device image. This example uses the KVM hypervisor.

# virt-install --accelerate --hvm --connect qemu:///system \
	--network network:default \
	--name rhel3support --ram=756\
	--file=/var/lib/libvirt/images/rhel3support.img \
	--file-size=6 --vnc --cdrom=/dev/sr0

Example 2.1. Using virt-install with KVM to create a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 guest

# virt-install --name Fedora11 --ram 512 --file=/var/lib/libvirt/images/Fedora11.img \
	--file-size=3 --vnc --cdrom=/var/lib/libvirt/images/Fedora11.iso