RHEL 6 Virtualization - Chapter 2. System requirements

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Chapter 2. 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,
GFS2 clustered file systems, and
Fibre Channel-based LUNs
SRP devices (SCSI RDMA Protocol), the block export protocol used in Infiniband and 10GbE iWARP adapters.

File-based guest storage

File-based guest images should be stored in the /var/lib/libvirt/images/ folder. If you use a different directory you must add the directory to the SELinux policy. Refer to Section 16.2, “SELinux and virtualization” for details.