Installation guide

Guest virtual machine requirements are further outlined in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Virtualization
Administration Guide in Chapter 6. Overcommitting with KVM.
Calcu lat in g swap space
Using swap space can provide additional memory beyond the available physical memory. The swap
partition is used for swapping underused memory to the hard drive to speed up memory performance.
The default size of the swap partition is calculated from the physical RAM of the host.
Red Hat Knowledgebase contains an article on safely and efficiently determining an appropriate size
for the swap partition, available here: https://access.redhat.com/site/solutions/15244.
KVM req u iremen t s
The KVM hypervisor requires:
an Intel processor with the Intel VT-x and Intel 64 extensions for x86-based systems, or
an AMD processor with the AMD-V and the AMD64 extensions.
Refer to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Virtualization Administration Guide to determine if your processor
has the virtualization extensions.
St o rage su p po rt
The guest virtual machine storage methods are:
files on local storage,
physical disk partitions,
locally connected physical LUNs,
LVM partitions,
NFS shared file systems,
iSCSI,
GFS2 clustered file systems,
Fibre Channel-based LUNs, and
Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE).
⁠Chapt er 2 . Syst em req u irement s
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