Howto | Create a Virtual Machine in KVM

Posted in: technology. Tagged: linux, howto, virtualisation

Creating a disk image for the guest

The following command will create a resizing 10G image in your current directory:

# /usr/bin/qemu-img create -f qcow2 vdisk.img 10G

Booting from CDROM

I struggled on our LTSP server to boot from CDROM, but found that I could boot easily from the downloaded IMG files (from Microsoft).

Boot from first CD image:

$ kvm -no-acpi -m 512 -cdrom /home/username/vdisks/w2k3/iso/X13-04874.img -boot d -hda w2k3.img -k en-gb -smp 2

Boot from second CD image:

$ kvm -no-acpi -m 512 -cdrom /home/username/vdisks/w2k3/iso/X13-04795.img -boot d -hda w2k3.img -k en-gb -smp 2

References

• http://kvm.qumranet.com/kvmwiki/HOWTO
• http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/545