Wow, KVM is great :-)
For my Windows workloads on Linux, I've been paying VMWare for years for their
Workstation product so I can run Windows programs like Visual Studio and Quicken.
Recently, having some issues with my Windows VM (VMWare using massive amounts of memory
and CPU beyond the VM allocation, and causing random latency on my desktop), I thought the
time was finally right to try out virsh and KVM again. Converting the VMWare image to KVM
worked flawlessly via `qemu-image convert`, and then after a whole bunch of hassles
getting the right virtio drivers and guest agent installed and working, the VM is running
great. It's running flawlessly, just as fast or faster than my VMWare image, and way
more efficient on memory and CPU. And I don't need to taint my kernel to run it.
I do have some follow-up questions though:
1) It seems the networking is not quite as straightforward as VMWare for a single-VM use
case. VMWare can run the VM in bridge mode, so that it appears to the rest of my LAN as
just another PC. Host-guest, and guest-other networking works perfectly. In contrast, in
virsh, it looks like none of the 3 options are as transparent:
https://wiki.libvirt.org/page/VirtualNetworking. Running in the default NAT mode, I have
two issues:
a) My guest DNS does not transparently work to access my LAN -- only the Internet. The
docs @ https://libvirt.org/formatnetwork.html do not provide any guidance for configuring
DNS settings. I want to forward requests to the dnsmasq running on the host system.
b) What is the best way to configure my host system to be able to see the NATed IP
addresses in the virtual network?
(Fedora 27, fully updated)
Thanks!
Raman