Can someone offer any advice as to whether OpenSUSE is well suited or not to use as a virtualization host for KVM? We have tried out various other Linux distros but none of them seem to work completely in this situation. Requirements and difficulties are:
Workstation Virtualization - both host partition and VMs all running on same physical machine
Mixed Windows and Linux guest operating systems
Access to NTFS partitions on same machine
Access to Windows network
Clean basic install for host KVM partition without Browser, Office or other unnecessary accessories and additions.
GUI required as this is for workstation virtualization
Support for dual-screens on nVidia GPU
Is there any known difficulties or anything in the above which suggests that OpenSUSE might not be the most suitable host OS for this purpose or should I download and give it a try?
Giving it a try would be easiest. I’ve never used KVM but I think it should be easier to do on CentOS 6 as RedHat is mostly involved with KVM development. They may set some pitfalls, however, to motivate people buying RedHat instead of using CentOS.
Thanks for your comments Greg. Yep, that is what concerns me about using CentOS for the purpose, I seem to recall reading about certain functionality which is not present in the current version of CentOS, probably for the reason you described.
[QUOTE=please_try_again;2438970]Hi. I have been using openSUSE, Fedora, Ubuntu and Arch Linux as kvm hosts without noticeable differences. What matters is the version of libvirtd, not the OS.
You might want to have a look of these two scripts:
Clean basic install for host KVM partition without Browser, Office or other unnecessary accessories and additions.
Not quite sure how else to describe it, the KVM Host (parent) install as opposed to the Guest (child) virtual machines which run inside the host partition. Looking for an install which reduces the attack area of that Host partition by installing only the minimum required.
Well, the virtual machine (guest) is inside a file and this file can be on any partition on the host or even on a remote host. You can put your virtual machines on a separate partition. That’s what I do. If you’re looking for a minimum installation on the host, there are some distros which focus on kvm. They are usually installed on dedicated servers. I have tested one of them but I cannot remember the name. But there are some. That’s problably what you’re looking for. They are usually based on RedHat. But you can achieve the same result with Arch Linux or any distro. You only need to install qemu, libvirt and virt-manager (if you want a GUI administration tool).