Installation guide

Chapter 1. Introduction
1.1. What is in t his guide?
This guide provides information on installing virtualization software and configuring guest machines
on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux virtualization host.
The initial chapters in this guide outline the prerequisites to enable a Red Hat Enterprise Linux host
machine to deploy virtualization. System requirements, compatible hardware, support and product
restrictions are covered in detail.
Basic host configuration, including mandatory and optional virtualization packages, are covered in
Chapter 5, Installing the virtualization packages.
Guest virtual machine installation is covered in detail starting from Chapter 6, Guest virtual machine
installation overview, with procedures for installing fully virtualized Red Hat Enterprise Linux guests
and Windows para-virtualized guests using virt-manager and virsh.
More detailed information on networking, PCI device configuration, SR-IOV, KVM guest timing
management, and troubleshooting help for libvirt and SR-IOV is included later in the guide.
Note
This book provides guidance for virtualization host configuration and guest installation. For
more detailed system configuration information, refer to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Virtualization Administration Guide.
1.2. Document at ion Suit e
Red Hat offers a wealth of documentation solutions across its various virtualization products.
Coverage of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and its inbuilt virtualization products includes:
Red Hat Enterprise Linux — Virtualization Getting Started Guide: This guide provides an introduction
to virtualization concepts, advantages, and tools, and an overview of Red Hat virtualization
documentation and products.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux — Virtualization Host Configuration and Guest Installation Guide (the book you
are reading): This guide covers the installation of virtualization software and configuration of
guest machines on a virtualization host.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux — Virtualization Administration Guide: This guide covers administration of
hosts, networking, storage, and device and guest management using either virt-manager or virsh
as primary configuration tools. This guide also includes a libvirt and QEMU reference, as well as
troubleshooting information.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux — Virtualization Security Guide: This guide provides an overview of
virtualization security technologies provided by Red Hat. Also included are recommendations for
securing hosts, guests, and shared infrastructure and resources in virtualized environments.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux — Virtualization Tuning and Optimization Guide: This guide provides tips,
tricks and suggestions for making full use of virtualization performance features and options for
your systems and guest virtual machines.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux — V2V Guide describes importing virtual machines from KVM, Xen and
Red Hat Ent erp rise Linux 6 Virt ualiz at ion Host Configurat ion and G uest Inst allat ion G uide
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