Best location for user documentation

[John W. Himpel]

I run my own sendmail server, dhcp server, dynamic dns server, ftp
server, mail server, ntp server, web server, etc.  So I am used to
reading an following user/administrator documentation.

What would be the best location to look for user/administrator
documentation for using KVM.  Most of what I find is either out of date
or very difficult for me to understand (I have tried reading "Part III
Configuration) of the Fedora 13 Virtualization Guide, but things like
PCI Passthru, SR_IVO USB device passthru and N_PortID are beyond my
knowledge.

My ultimate goal would be to run many of my services in their own
individual VM.  I would also like to use KVM to allow me to test new
services inside a confined sandbox.

I also have to run a proprietary VPN under Win 7 to access my network at
work.  I would like to run Win 7 under KVM, but I got lost about do I
need win-virtio drivers or not.  If so, it talks about making a floppy
for installation time.  Would making a DVD with the drivers work as
well?

Any pointers would be greatly appreciated.

[Tom Horsley]

On Wed, 29 Sep 2010 16:08:21 -0500
John Himpel wrote:

>  Any pointers would be greatly appreciated. 
I second that - it is very difficult to start from scratch
and sort out the outdated docs from the close to accurate
ones (I don't think there are any accurate ones :-).

I have some pointers to things I've figured out, but
they already assume lots of implicit knowledge of KVM:

http://home.comcast.net/~tomhorsley/wisdom/braindump/kvm.html

Probably the best thing to do is fire up virt-manager
and create a new VM installing from an iso image. The
GUI guides you through that pretty well, and after
seeing the jargon on the screens in the GUI, you can
start doing more focused google searches.

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Wed, Sep 29, 2010 at 04:08:21PM -0500, John Himpel wrote:
>  What would be the best location to look for user/administrator
>  documentation for using KVM.  Most of what I find is either out of date
>  or very difficult for me to understand (I have tried reading "Part III
>  Configuration) of the Fedora 13 Virtualization Guide, but things like
>  PCI Passthru, SR_IVO USB device passthru and N_PortID are beyond my
>  knowledge. 
Justin is working on improving the documentation (CC'd).

My advice would be the same as for the other respondant.  Start up
virt-manager and follow the wizard to create one or two test VMs.
Once you have these you can try out the command line tools, eg:

 # virsh list --all
 # virsh dumpxml <GuestName>

If you follow the 'tip' and/or 'virt-tools' tags on my blog you'll
find that I regularly post tips on how to use the tools, and there is
an archive of posts going back over a year:

  http://rwmj.wordpress.com/tag/tip/
  http://rwmj.wordpress.com/tag/virt-tools/

We are also working on a virt tools umbrella website which will
contain introductory documentation.

>  I also have to run a proprietary VPN under Win 7 to access my network
> at
>  work.  I would like to run Win 7 under KVM, but I got lost about do I
>  need win-virtio drivers or not.  If so, it talks about making a floppy
>  for installation time.  Would making a DVD with the drivers work as
>  well? 
Virtio has historically (and still now) been very under-documented.

Part of the problem with Windows is that we're not allowed (by MSFT
licensing) to distribute the fully signed drivers, which means you
have to hack your Windows guest registry so that it can load unsigned
drivers.  Which actually you can do almost automatically using
virt-win-reg, but it's not documented yet how to do this ...

So for Windows it's all a bit of a mess.  FWIW I use IDE emulation for
all my own Windows guests, but then I don't really use Windows very
much.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
virt-p2v converts physical machines to virtual machines.  Boot with a
live CD or over the network (PXE) and turn machines into Xen guests.
http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-p2v

[Justin Forbes]

On Wed, 2010-09-29 at 16:08 -0500, John Himpel wrote:
>  I also have to run a proprietary VPN under Win 7 to access my network
> at
>  work.  I would like to run Win 7 under KVM, but I got lost about do I
>  need win-virtio drivers or not.  If so, it talks about making a floppy
>  for installation time.  Would making a DVD with the drivers work as
>  well? 
Floppy is required for block installation in earlier windows versions
(XP).  An ISO image is acceptable for newer Windows versions.  We do
provide  both ISO and floppy images for the virtio Windows drivers which
are signed by Red Hat (not WHQL).  It is not required that you run
Windows with virtio, but it is highly recommended.
http://alt.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/virtio-win/latest/images/bin


Justin