Windows on the bin

KVM Guests: Graceful Shutdown

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000

So a fairly trivial (but critical) aspect of using KVM is of course performing graceful shutdowns of your domains, without having to reach inside of the guest to perform the shutdown. Now when it comes to turning off your guests you have two ways of proceeding (with virsh)…

bash

virsh destroy vmname

Which is a HARD power off of your guest. This is the same as pulling the power cord from the wall, nothing is shutdown, but the noise stops just the same. This method can result in data corruption if writes are interrupted.

KVM Guests: Install VirtIO Drivers for Windows Guests

Tue, 22 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Windows guests on the KVM hypervisors can get a very large kick in the pants when it comes to performance if you install the drivers necessary to leverage the VirtIO bus. So first here are the necessary download links so that you can download the drivers.

http://alt.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/virtio-win/latest/images/bin/virtio-win-1.1.16.iso

http://alt.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/virtio-win/latest/images/

Inside of the ISO we will find four directories Balloon, NetKVM, vioserial, and viostor. We are only concerned with viostor and NetKVM, for the storage and networking drivers. Vioserial is a serial interface which essentially lifts the single serial device limitation within KVM, and Balloon is a balloon memory driver I personally do not find this necessary due to the efficacy of the Kernel Samepage Merging (KSM) which is essentially memory deduplication.

Linux-KVM: Managing KVM Guests Using Virt-Manager on Windows

Mon, 21 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000

When I first started using KVM, I was quite disappointed with the graphical management abilities of KVM. Basically if you want to manage via the command line KVM is a fantasical dream world where anything is possible and it is all “musical sunshine” and “double rainbows” but if you want the ability to manage graphically it was a world which was very one sided in that if you wanted the ability to graphically manage your VMs then you had to use Linux. Or so I thought…