Installing KVM on RHEL/CentOS 6.x involves the following steps:
- Verify hardware virtualization support: Make sure that your hardware supports virtualization. You can check this by running the following command:
grep -E 'vmx|svm' /proc/cpuinfo
- Install KVM packages: The KVM packages can be installed using the “yum” package manager. Run the following command in your terminal:
yum install qemu-kvm libvirt libvirt-python libvirt-client virt-install
- Load the KVM module: Load the KVM module by running the following command:
modprobe kvm
- Start the libvirtd service: Start the libvirtd service by running the following command:
systemctl start libvirtd
- Verify the installation: Verify the installation by running the following command:
virsh list
This command should return an empty list, indicating that no virtual machines are running.
- Configure network bridge: Configure a network bridge for your virtual machines to use. The bridge can be created using the following commands:
nmcli connection add type bridge con-name br0 ifname br0
nmcli connection modify br0 ipv4.method manual ipv4.addresses 192.168.122.1/24
nmcli connection modify br0 ipv4.dns "192.168.122.1"
nmcli connection up br0
- Create virtual machines: To create virtual machines, you can use the “virt-install” tool. The syntax for creating a virtual machine is as follows:
virt-install --name [VM name] --memory [memory size in MB] --vcpus [number of virtual CPUs] --disk [path to virtual disk file] --network bridge=br0 --graphics vnc,listen=0.0.0.0 --os-type [operating system type] --os-variant [operating system variant] --noautoconsole
Replace the placeholder values in square brackets with the appropriate values for your virtual machine.
This is a high-level overview of the steps involved in installing and configuring KVM on RHEL/CentOS 6.x. For more detailed information, refer to the official KVM documentation.