I spent a couple of days a while back trying to figure out why I was seeing bizarre bridge and network errors in my KVM host’s syslog and a VM that only two of three NICs worked at a time. Turns out that there is a very simple fix for both problems. First, let’s start with the KVM host network configuration. Here’s the basic config for a host with two NICs.

One of my criteria for choosing a virtualization platform is that it had to run Windows and Linux guests. Linux, of course, works out of the box on most VM hosts. Windows is a whole other story. The good news is that Windows Server 2003 and Server 2008 work just fine on KVM. There are, however, a few weird things that I’ve noticed so I thought I’d share some of them with you today.

I thought I would take a few minutes and share some of my experiences with Linux KVM. In this first post, I’d like to share some things about live migration. First, live migration works great … if you have the right version of KVM. Kvm-69, which is included with Ubuntu Hardy, is broken. Starting with kvm-70, live migration works again and works very well. You hardly even notice at all if you’re logged into the machine remotely while it migrates.

We’re in the process of trying to virtualize our data center at work. I was given the task of testing and evaluating the various VM technologies. I have to say that I am not impressed. VMWare ESX Let’s start with the big player in the VM world, VMWare ESX. The Banner team uses ESX for a few of their servers. ESX stood head and shoulders over everything else that I looked at.