Where do things go wrong?

[snesreviews]

Hi Guys,

I have successfully set this up for RHEL3, 4 and 5, but I am having difficulty running a few distributions, namely Red Hat 8 (yes - the oldie) and Solaris 10.

They both seem to fall over (judging from the console) at very early stages in their boot process. Solaris complains about its boot blocks, and RH8 just kernel panics on startup.

I'm not expecting you guys to fix these things, by the way, but could you give us an overview of which underlying software is responsible for what? I.e. Network/BIOS/Memory Management/CPU Niceness/?

 

[tog]

Are you running these with KVM?

http://kvm.qumranet.com/kvmwiki/Status

Proxmox VE uses two virtualization technologies; KVM and OpenVZ.

OpenVZ is virtualization of the Linux kernel so it should work for any Linux dist at pretty much full speed. KVM is a more generalized amd64 virtual machine so you can boot any i386/amd64 OS.

 

[snesreviews]

I used KVM for all installations. Thanks for the link - just popped on a couple more distros !

It seems red hat 7 crashed on startup too so it's no real surprise that red hat 8 fell over as well. I'm going to try my luck with an earlier version of solaris to see if that's any different.

Are there any tweaking options I can play with in order to make this work? Is there a breakdown of config files vs applications? From what I can tell:

This config file:
ostype: other
network: model=rtl8139,tap
memory: 512
onboot: 1
cdrom: cdrom
name: bsol10x-10
hda: /var/lib/vz/images/vm-104-default.qcow2


Is used to generate this command line:
/usr/bin/kvm -monitor pty -vnc unix:/tmp/qemu-server-vnc-104.socket,password -usbdevice tablet -name bsol10x-10 -k en-us -drive file=/var/lib/vz/images/vm-104-default.qcow2,index=0,if=ide,media=disk -drive file=/dev/cdrom,index=2,media=cdrom -m 512 -net nic,model=rtl8139 -net tap

Is that all there is to it in terms of tweaking the way in which a guest is virtualised? The README for qemu-server states that the syntax should mean that:

banana: fruit

Should translate to:

-banana fruit

on the kvm command line... but if that's the case, how does "network" get resolved to "-net"?

On the proxmox general scheme of things, is there another config file I should be editing at a higher level?

Cheers!

 

[dietmar]

It seems red hat 7 crashed on startup too so it's no real surprise that red hat 8 fell over as well. I'm going to try my luck with an earlier version of solaris to see if that's any different.

Are there any tweaking options I can play with in order to make this work? Is there a breakdown of config files vs applications? From what I can tell:

Next version will include better documentation for qemu-server (configuration format is also changed).

If you want to debug kvm you need to run from command line, for example:

[FONT=Courier New]usr/bin/kvm -vnc :1,password -usbdevice tablet -name bsol10x-10 -k en-us -drive file=/var/lib/vz/images/vm-104-default.qcow2,index=0,if=ide,media=disk -drive file=/dev/cdrom,index=2,media=cdrom -m 512 -net nic,model=rtl8139 -net tap[/FONT]

An then connect via normal vncviewer (port 5901).

Then you can use all qemu/kvm options (http://bellard.org/qemu/qemu-doc.html)

RH7, RH8 does not work, see:
http://kvm.qumranet.com/kvmwiki/Guest_Support_Status

- Dietmar

 

[snesreviews]

Thanks - this is exactly what I was looking for:
http://bellard.org/qemu/qemu-doc.html

I know about RH8 not working - it was me who put its entry on the wiki page after I gave up hope when I saw someone log that RH7 didn't work .

I was just wondering if there were some command line options which I could play with to try and get them to work (particularly on solaris), so that link should give plenty of food for thought!

Cheers!