5.2. Installing Virtualization Packages on an Existing Red Hat Enterprise Linux System
5.2. Installing Virtualization Packages on an Existing Red Hat Enterprise Linux System This section describes the steps for installing the KVM hypervisor on a working Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 or newer system. To install the packages, your machines must be registered. To register using Red Hat Subscription Manager, run the subscription-manager register command and follow the prompts. If you do not have a valid Red Hat subscription, visit the Red Hat online store to obtain one. Note Red Hat Network (RHN) has now been deprecated. Subscription Manager should now be used for registration tasks. Installing the Virtualization Packages with yum To use virtualization on Red Hat Enterprise Linux you require at least the qemu-kvm and qemu-img packages. These packages provide the user-level KVM emulator and disk image manager on the host Red Hat Enterprise Linux system. To install the qemu-kvm and qemu-img packages, run the following command: Several additional virtualization management packages are also available: Recommended virtualization packages python-virtinst Provides the virt-install command for creating virtual machines. libvirt The libvirt package provides the server and host side libraries for interacting with hypervisors and host systems. The libvirt package provides the libvirtd daemon that handles the library calls, manages virtual machines and controls the hypervisor. libvirt-python The libvirt-python package contains a module that permits applications written in the Python programming language to use the interface supplied by the libvirt API. virt-manager virt-manager , also known as Virtual Machine Manager , provides a graphical tool for administering virtual machines. It uses libvirt-client library as the management API. libvirt-client The libvirt-client package provides the client-side APIs and libraries for accessing libvirt servers. The libvirt-client package includes the virsh command line tool to manage and control virtual machines and hypervisors from the command line or a special virtualization shell. Install all of these recommended virtualization packages with the following command: Installing Virtualization Package Groups The virtualization packages can also be installed from package groups. The following table describes the virtualization package groups and what they provide. Note Note that the qemu-img package is installed as a dependency of the Virtualization package group if it is not already installed on the system. It can also be installed manually with the yum install qemu-img command as described previously. Table 5.1. Virtualization package groups Package Group Description Mandatory Packages Optional Packages Virtualization Provides an environment for hosting virtual machines qemu-kvm qemu-guest-agent, qemu-kvm-tools Virtualization Client Clients for installing and managing virtualization instances python-virtinst, virt-manager, virt-viewer virt-top Virtualization Platform Provides an interface for accessing and controlling virtual machines and containers libvirt, libvirt-client, virt-who, virt-what fence-virtd-libvirt, fence-virtd-multicast, fence-virtd-serial, libvirt-cim, libvirt-java, libvirt-qmf, libvirt-snmp, perl-Sys-Virt Virtualization Tools Tools for offline virtual image management libguestfs libguestfs-java, libguestfs-tools, virt-v2v To install a package group, run the yum groupinstall <groupname> command. For instance, to install the Virtualization Tools package group, run the yum groupinstall "Virtualization Tools" command.
yum install qemu-kvm qemu-img yum install virt-manager libvirt libvirt-python python-virtinst libvirt-client