[kwlug-disc] Virtualization technology

[Chris Irwin]

My primary workstation at work runs Fedora. However, I also have an
always-on Windows VM as I'll often need to fire up Office, Acrobat, or even
our own application ;).

I created my Win7 VM using virt-manager, which is a front-end for libvirt,
which uses kvm for the actual heavy lifting. I use use SPICE as the display
protocol, which I don't believe was default for Windows (and finding
drivers for Windows was and is a pain).

However, I have the VM start at boot (easily configured via virt-manager),
and actually use remote-viewer to interact with it (instead of
virt-manager) for several reasons:

1. Seems to have better spice support

2. Supports multiple displays (I have dual monitors, and I can
enable/disable the secondary output based on how much windows work I need
to do)

3. Supports setting a custom window class, so I can make a matching
.desktop file, and give myself a pretty custom icon in the alt+tab list.

$ remote-viewer --class=windows7 --name=windows7 -f -t Windows 7
spice://localhost:5900

Note that there is an ongoing issue with CPU utilization when using virtio
disks on a Windows guest that gets worse over time. I've just learned to
live with rebooting my Windows VM every couple of days.


On Tue, Jul 29, 2014 at 2:02 AM, Khalid Baheyeldin <kb at 2bits.com> wrote:

> Regarding CPU virtualization support for 64 bit guest.
>
> You can check if your host can support this using:
>
> egrep "svm|vmx" /proc/cpuinfo
>
> If it returns something, then your CPU can use x86_64 images,
> otherwise, you are stuck with 32 bits.
>
> My laptop's CPU is Intel Core2 Duo CPUT6500 @ 2.10GHz, and does not
> have it, but my server is AMD Athlon II X4 635 and does support it.
> --
> Khalid M. Baheyeldin
> 2bits.com, Inc.
> Fast Reliable Drupal
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> and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken
>
>
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-- 
Chris Irwin
<chris at chrisirwin.ca>
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