Virtualized guests support up to a maximum of 64 virtualized CPUs in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0.

Systems without a Constant Time Stamp Counter require additional configuration. Refer to Chapter 14, KVM guest timing management for details on determining whether you have a Constant Time Stamp Counter and configuration steps for fixing any related issues.

KVM supports memory overcommit and can store the memory of guests in swap. A guest will run slower if it is swapped frequently. When KSM is used, make sure that the swap size is the size of the overcommit ratio.

It is not recommended to have more than 10 virtual CPUs per physical processor core. Any number of overcommitted virtual CPUs above the number of physical processor cores may cause problems with certain virtualized guests.

Overcommitting CPUs has some risk and can lead to instability. Refer to Chapter 20, Overcommitting with KVM for tips and recommendations on overcommitting CPUs.

SCSI emulation is limited to 16 virtualized (emulated) SCSI devices..

KVM is limited to a maximum of four virtualized (emulated) IDE devices per guest.

Para-virtualized devices, which use the virtio drivers, are PCI devices. Presently, guests are limited to a maximum of 32 PCI devices. Some PCI devices are critical for the guest to run and these devices cannot be removed. The default, required devices are:

Out of the 32 available PCI devices for a guest 4 are not removable. This means there are only 28 PCI slots available for additional devices per guest. Every para-virtualized network or block device uses one slot. Each guest can use up to 28 additional devices made up of any combination of para-virtualized network, para-virtualized disk devices, or other PCI devices using VT-d.

Live migration is only possible with CPUs from the same vendor (that is, Intel to Intel or AMD to AMD only).

The No eXecution (NX) bit must be set to on or off for both CPUs for live migration.

The host should not use disk labels to identify file systems in the fstab file, the initrd file or used by the kernel command line. If less privileged users, especially virtualized guests, have write access to whole partitions or LVM volumes the host system could be compromised.

Guest should not be given write access to whole disks or block devices (for example, /dev/sdb). Virtualized guests with access to block devices may be able to access other block devices on the system or modify volume labels which can be used to compromise the host system. Use partitions (for example, /dev/sdb1) or LVM volumes to prevent this issue.

SR-IOV is only supported with the following devices:

Intel® 82576NS Gigabit Ethernet Controller (igb driver)

Intel® 82576EB Gigabit Ethernet Controller (igb driver)

Neterion X3100 Series 10GbE PCIe (vxge driver)

Intel® 82599ES 10 Gigabit Ethernet Controller (ixgbe driver)

Intel® 82599EB 10 Gigabit Ethernet Controller (ixgbe driver)

PCI passthrough (attaching PCI devices to guests) should work on systems with the AMD IOMMU or Intel VT-d technologies.