[CentOS-virt] KVM Support for Windows Server 2003 32 bit ready for production?

2009-12-02 Thread Neil Aggarwal 
Hello:

I am wondering if KVM is ready for production
for running a Windows Server 2003 32 bit guest.

According to the RHEL 5.4 virtualization guide,
there is supposed to be a virtio-win yum package,
but that was not released.  Instead, it looks like
that is only available for RHN subscribers.

Also, I saw this posting on the CentOS list:

--- Quoted from CL Martinez
There are freely redistributable, but still they aren't published by
upstream. You 
can use these instead: 
http://www.linux-kvm.com/content/windows-binary-virtio-drivers-finally-relea
sed, but 
there are a lot of problems with any windows 64 bits. And another problem, a
big 
really, is that you can¡t install a windows kvm guest directly to a virtio
disk. 
First you need to install to an ide disk, after generate a virtio disk and
attach to 
win guest, install the virtio driver and last remove ide drive ... very very
ugly.
 End Quote

That seems to imply things are still not ready for production
use.

Any opinions?

Thanks,
Neil


--
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Re: [CentOS-virt] KVM Support for Windows Server 2003 32 bit ready for production?

2009-12-02 Thread Kenni Lund 
2009/12/2 Kenni Lund ke...@kelu.dk:
 2009/12/2 Neil Aggarwal n...@jammconsulting.com:
 I am wondering if KVM is ready for production
 for running a Windows Server 2003 32 bit guest.
SNIP

 Well, the drivers works just fine for 64 bit guests, but they're
 tricky to install in their current form, since they _NEED_ to be
 signed correctly...if you sign them yourself, you'll need to enable
 test mode in Windows, which indeed is just as ugly as the add a
 secondary harddisk to install the virtio drivers fix. This is exactly
 why we need the virt-win package, which apparently both contain an iso
 with *.msi files for installing the drivers within Windows, as well as
 a floppy image for installation of drivers during the installation of
 Windows.

 The ugly part is the installation of unsigned VirtIO block device
 drivers...if you can live with e1000 NIC emulation (close to same
 performance, but a bit higher CPU utillization) and IDE emulation,
 then you shouldn't have any stability issues and no ugly hacks.
 Performance should still be fairly good.

Just replying myself now :) If you want to test out the production
readiness/stability of KVM with VirtIO without going through all the
selfsigning stuff and manually copying the files back and forth from
your virtual machines, feel free to use the following iso, which I
created for my own use. It contains the latest binary drivers from
http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/WindowsGuestDrivers/Download_Drivers,
which afterwards have been self-signed with a test certificate, put
into directories matching the names of the compatible Windows versions
and compiled into an iso, which makes it easy to install, since you
can just mount it directly into your virtual KVM machine. In order to
test it on a Windows 2003 Server 32bit you don't need to enable any
testsigning mode, you should just do the following:
- Install Windows 2003 without any VirtIO devices
- Shut it down
-- Add a secondary HDD which uses the VirtIO interface
-- Change the NIC to use the VirtIO interface
-- Mount the iso as a cdrom in the virtual machine
- Boot the system and point it towards the block and NIC drivers on the CD
- Shut down the virtual machine
- Remove the secondary HDD and change the primary to use VirtIO instead of IDE
- Done

I've uploaded the iso here, in case you want to try it out:
http://www.student.dtu.dk/~kllu/VirtIO_24-09-2009.iso

Best Regards
Kenni Lund
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