Chapter 23. Virtualization


The most notable changes to virtualization between RHEL 9 and RHEL 10 include the following:

The i440fx-rhel7.6 machine type has been removed

In RHEL 10, the i440fx-rhel7.6 machine type for virtual machines (VMs) has been replaced by i440fx-rhel10.0. As a consequence, VMs that use i440fx-rhel7.6 cannot boot after upgrading your host to RHEL 10. Similarly, live-migrating a VM that uses i440fx-rhel7.6 to a RHEL 10 host causes the VM to stop working.

To verify the machine type of a VM, use the following command:

# virsh dumpxml <vm-name> | grep "machine="

<type arch='x86_64' machine='pc-i440fx-rhel7.6'>hvm</type>
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To ensure that a VM with the i440fx-rhel7.6 machine type can run on your RHEL 10 host, do the following:

  1. Open the XML configuration of the VM:

    # virsh edit <vm-name>
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  2. On the <type> line, change the machine parameter to pc-i440fx-rhel10.0.
  3. Save and exit the VM configuration.

Note that the i440fx machine type has also become deprecated in RHEL 10, and will be removed comletely in a future major version of RHEL.

virt-v2v removes support for certain Red Hat products

In RHEL 10, the virt-v2v tool can no longer convert virtual machines from a RHEL 5 Xen host to KVM.

In addition, virt-v2v no longer supports exporting virtual machines to Red Hat Virtualization (RHV). As a consequence, the following options are no longer available in virt-v2v:

  • -o rhv-upload
  • -o rhv
  • -o vdsm

virt-p2v conversion is not available

The virt-p2v tool cannot be used to convert a physical machine into a KVM virtual machine for a RHEL 10 host. For instructions on using virt-p2v for RHEL 7, RHEL 8, and RHEL 9, see the Red Hat KnowledgeBase.

RDMA-based migration has become unsupported

In RHEL 10, migrating virtual machines (VMs) by using Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) is no longer supported. Therefore, Red Hat highly discourages using the rdma URI for VM migration.

Legacy CPU models are now removed

A significant number of CPU models that were deprecated in RHEL 9 have become become unsupported, and can no longer be used in virtual machines (VMs) in RHEL 10. The removed models are as follows:

  • For Intel: models before Intel Xeon 55xx and 75xx Processor families (also known as Nehalem)
  • For AMD: models before AMD Opteron G4
  • For IBM Z: models before IBM z14

Note that several other CPU models, including Nehalem and Opteron G4, have become deprecated in RHEL 10, and will become unsupported in a future major release of RHEL. For a complete list of the deprecated CPU models, use the following command:

/usr/libexec/qemu-kvm -cpu help | grep depre | grep -v - -v
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To check whether your VM is using a deprecated CPU model, use the virsh dominfo utility, and look for a line similar to the following in the Messages section:

tainted: use of deprecated configuration settings
deprecated configuration: CPU model 'Nehalem'
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