Installation guide

Chapter 2.
11
System requirements
This chapter lists system requirements for successfully running virtualized guest operating systems
with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. Virtualization is available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 on the Intel
64 and AMD64 architecture.
The KVM hypervisor is provided with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.
For information on installing the virtualization packages, read Chapter 5, Installing the virtualization
packages.
Minimum system requirements
• 6GB free disk space
• 2GB of RAM.
Recommended system requirements
• 6GB plus the required disk space recommended by the guest operating system per guest. For most
operating systems more than 6GB of disk space is recommended.
• One processor core or hyper-thread for each virtualized CPU and one for the hypervisor.
• 2GB of RAM plus additional RAM for virtualized guests.
KVM overcommit
KVM can overcommit physical resources for virtualized guests. Overcommitting resources means
the total virtualized RAM and processor cores used by the guests can exceed the physical RAM
and processor cores on the host. For information on safely overcommitting resources with KVM
refer to Chapter 20, Overcommitting with KVM.
KVM requirements
The KVM hypervisor requires:
• an Intel processor with the Intel VT and the Intel 64 extensions, or
• an AMD processor with the AMD-V and the AMD64 extensions.
Refer to Section 24.3, “Verifying virtualization extensions” to determine if your processor has the
virtualization extensions.
Storage support
The working guest storage methods are:
• files on local storage,
• physical disk partitions,
• locally connected physical LUNs,
• LVM partitions,
• NFS shared file systems,
• iSCSI,