Eric D. Schabell: Setup KVM (virtualization) in Fedora 10

Monday, August 17, 2009

Setup KVM (virtualization) in Fedora 10

I was looking at the various howto's on the internet to get this up and running, but it would not work for me. I kept getting the two error messages below depending on the type of virtualization used (Xen vs. Qemu):

# with Xen I got this when trying to connect my local 
# default machine.
#
Unable to open connection to hypervisor URI 'xen:///'

# and with Qemu I got this when trying to connect my
# local default machine.
#
Unable to open connection to hypervisor 'qemu:///'

A few things needed to be installed for qemu to get this working properly so you can define and install a new virtual machine:

# Standard Virtulization packages in the group which
# once installed will get you to the same error messages
# above once you try to connect your local machine in
# the Virtual Machine Manager.
#
$ yum groupinstall 'Virtualization'

# now we need some qemu stuff:
#
$ yum install qemu qemu-launcher virt-manager virt-mem

After this I could connect to my local machine (qemu:///system) using the Virtual Machine Manager.