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4.2. Basic Requirements and Setup

To set up a KVM virtual machine on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, your system must meet the following criteria:
Architecture
Virtualization with the KVM hypervisor is currently only supported on Intel 64 and AMD64 systems.
Disk space and RAM
Minimum:
  • 6 GB free disk space
  • 2 GB RAM
Customer Portal subscription
To install virtualization packages, your host machine must be registered and subscribed to the Red Hat Customer Portal. To register run the subscription-manager register command and follow the prompts. Alternatively, run the Red Hat Subscription Manager application from Applications System Tools on the desktop to register.
If you do not have a valid Red Hat subscription, visit the Red Hat online store to obtain one. For more information on registering and subscribing a system to the Red Hat Customer Portal, see https://access.redhat.com/solutions/253273.
Required packages
Before you can use virtualization, a basic set of virtualization packages must be installed on your computer.

Procedure 4.1. Installing the virtualization packages with yum

To use virtualization on Red Hat Enterprise Linux the libvirt, qemu-kvm and qemu-img packages must be installed. These packages provide the user-level KVM emulator and disk image manager on the host system.
  1. Install the qemu-kvm, qemu-img, libvirt, and virt-manager packages with the following command:
    Copy to Clipboard Toggle word wrap 
    # yum install qemu-kvm qemu-img libvirt virt-manager
  2. Download a Red Hat Enterprise Linux  7 Workstation binary DVD ISO image from the Red Hat Customer Portal. This image will be used to install the guest virtual machine's operating system.

Note

If you encounter any problems during the installation process, see the Troubleshooting section of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Virtualization Host Configuration and Guest Installation Guide.
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