Intel VT, AMD-V, VMware and KVM... confused!

lordy

Dear all,

while preparing for the RHCSA exam I also wanted to play with KVM virtualization.

I have only been working with VMware ESX/Fusion and VirtualBox so far so this is pretty much new territory for me. Since KVM seems to take a different approach I understand that it is dependent on the CPU's support for either Intel VT or AMD-V. Is this correct?

Today I installed RHEL 6 on a Dell PowerEdge 2850 which, according to /proc/cpuinfo, does not have vmx/VT support. The only other hardware I have at home is an iMac (first aluminium model from 2007, 2 GHz) and a MacBook Pro (also Core 2 Duo). There are different reports on wether their CPUs have VT and if VMware Fusion is able to pass it through to VM. I understand that running KVM inside Fusion would probably be very slow but I guess that it would be sufficient for playing and learning.

Is there any way I can run KVM with the hardware/OS I have now. It seems that even the cheapest hardware configuration I could buy would be at least $200 and I don't want to spend that much on hardware for just playing around...

Thanks for your help!

MentholMoose

lordy wrote: »

I have only been working with VMware ESX/Fusion and VirtualBox so far so this is pretty much new territory for me. Since KVM seems to take a different approach I understand that it is dependent on the CPU's support for either Intel VT or AMD-V. Is this correct?

Yes, KVM requires virtualization extensions (Intel VT-x or AMD-V) to function.

lordy wrote: »

There are different reports on wether their CPUs have VT and if VMware Fusion is able to pass it through to VM. I understand that running KVM inside Fusion would probably be very slow but I guess that it would be sufficient for playing and learning.

No hypervisors pass through the virtualization extensions to VMs, including Fusion, so KVM won't work in a VM.

lordy wrote: »

Is there any way I can run KVM with the hardware/OS I have now.

If one of your Core 2 Duo machines supports VT-x, you can probably install RHEL on it to use KVM. You can check if your processor supports VT-x on the Intel website or this convenient list:
List of Intel Core 2 microprocessors - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

bchoi0000

lordy wrote: »

Dear all,

while preparing for the RHCSA exam I also wanted to play with KVM virtualization.

I have only been working with VMware ESX/Fusion and VirtualBox so far so this is pretty much new territory for me. Since KVM seems to take a different approach I understand that it is dependent on the CPU's support for either Intel VT or AMD-V. Is this correct?

Today I installed RHEL 6 on a Dell PowerEdge 2850 which, according to /proc/cpuinfo, does not have vmx/VT support. The only other hardware I have at home is an iMac (first aluminium model from 2007, 2 GHz) and a MacBook Pro (also Core 2 Duo). There are different reports on wether their CPUs have VT and if VMware Fusion is able to pass it through to VM. I understand that running KVM inside Fusion would probably be very slow but I guess that it would be sufficient for playing and learning.

Is there any way I can run KVM with the hardware/OS I have now. It seems that even the cheapest hardware configuration I could buy would be at least $200 and I don't want to spend that much on hardware for just playing around...

Thanks for your help!

Hi Lordy, may I ask if you got KVM working and on what platform? I'm also looking around for a VT-x capable system. I want to avoid having to install RH on an external disk to my iMac.

lordy

A friend of mine kindly borrowed me his Lenovo R61 Laptop. It has Intel VT support