3.3. Installing guest agents and drivers
3.3.1. Red Hat Virtualization Guest agents, tools, and drivers
The Red Hat Virtualization guest agents, tools, and drivers provide additional functionality for virtual machines, such as gracefully shutting down or rebooting virtual machines from the VM Portal and Administration Portal. The tools and agents also provide information for virtual machines, including:
- Resource usage
- IP addresses
The guest agents, tools and drivers are distributed as an ISO file that you can attach to virtual machines. This ISO file is packaged as an RPM file that you can install and upgrade from the Manager machine.
You need to install the guest agents and drivers on a virtual machine to enable this functionality for that machine.
| Driver | Description | Works on |
|---|---|---|
|
| Paravirtualized network driver provides enhanced performance over emulated devices like rtl. | Server and Desktop. |
|
| Paravirtualized HDD driver offers increased I/O performance over emulated devices like IDE by optimizing the coordination and communication between the virtual machine and the hypervisor. The driver complements the software implementation of the virtio-device used by the host to play the role of a hardware device. | Server and Desktop. |
|
| Paravirtualized iSCSI HDD driver offers similar functionality to the virtio-block device, with some additional enhancements. In particular, this driver supports adding hundreds of devices, and names devices using the standard SCSI device naming scheme. | Server and Desktop. |
|
| Virtio-serial provides support for multiple serial ports. The improved performance is used for fast communication between the virtual machine and the host that avoids network complications. This fast communication is required for the guest agents and for other features such as clipboard copy-paste between the virtual machine and the host and logging. | Server and Desktop. |
|
| Virtio-balloon is used to control the amount of memory a virtual machine actually accesses. It offers improved memory overcommitment. | Server and Desktop. |
|
| A paravirtualized display driver reduces CPU usage on the host and provides better performance through reduced network bandwidth on most workloads. | Server and Desktop. |
| Guest agent/tool | Description | Works on |
|---|---|---|
|
|
Used instead of | Server and Desktop. |
|
| The SPICE agent supports multiple monitors and is responsible for client-mouse-mode support to provide a better user experience and improved responsiveness than the QEMU emulation. Cursor capture is not needed in client-mouse-mode. The SPICE agent reduces bandwidth usage when used over a wide area network by reducing the display level, including color depth, disabling wallpaper, font smoothing, and animation. The SPICE agent enables clipboard support allowing cut and paste operations for both text and images between client and virtual machine, and automatic guest display setting according to client-side settings. On Windows-based virtual machines, the SPICE agent consists of vdservice and vdagent. | Server and Desktop. |
3.3.2. Installing the guest agents, tools, and drivers on Windows
Procedure
To install the guest agents, tools, and drivers on a Windows virtual machine, complete the following steps:
On the Manager machine, install the
virtio-winpackage:# dnf install virtio-win*
After you install the package, the ISO file is located in
/usr/share/virtio-win/virtio-win_version.isoon the Manager machine.-
Upload
virtio-win_version.isoto a data storage domain. See Uploading Images to a Data Storage Domain in the Administration Guide for details. -
In the Administration or VM Portal, if the virtual machine is running, use the Change CD button to attach the
virtio-win_version.isofile to each of your virtual machines. If the virtual machine is powered off, click the Run Once button and attach the ISO as a CD. - Log in to the virtual machine.
-
Select the CD Drive containing the
virtio-win_version.isofile. You can complete the installation with either the GUI or the command line. Run the installer.
- To install with the GUI, complete the following steps
-
Double-click
virtio-win-guest-tools.exe. - Click at the welcome screen.
- Follow the prompts in the installation wizard.
- When installation is complete, select Yes, I want to restart my computer now and click Finish to apply the changes.
-
Double-click
- To install silently with the command line, complete the following steps
- Open a command prompt with Administrator privileges.
Enter the
msiexeccommand:D:\ msiexec /i "PATH_TO_MSI" /qn [/l*v "PATH_TO_LOG"][/norestart] ADDLOCAL=ALL
Other possible values for ADDLOCAL are listed below.
For example, to run the installation when
virtio-win-gt-x64.msiis on theD:\drive, without saving the log, and then immediately restart the virtual machine, enter the following command:D:\ msiexec /i "virtio-win-gt-x64.msi" /qn ADDLOCAL=ALL
After installation completes, the guest agents and drivers pass usage information to the Red Hat Virtualization Manager and enable you to access USB devices and other functionality.
3.3.3. Values for ADDLOCAL to customize virtio-win command-line installation
When installing virtio-win-gt-x64.msi or virtio-win-gt-x32.msi with the command line, you can install any one driver, or any combination of drivers.
You can also install specific agents, but you must also install each agent’s corresponding drivers.
The ADDLOCAL parameter of the msiexec command enables you to specify which drivers or agents to install. ADDLOCAL=ALL installs all drivers and agents. Other values are listed in the following tables.
| Value for ADDLOCAL | Driver Name | Description |
|---|---|---|
|
|
| Paravirtualized network driver provides enhanced performance over emulated devices like rtl. |
|
|
| Controls the amount of memory a virtual machine actually accesses. It offers improved memory overcommitment. |
|
|
| QEMU pvpanic device driver. |
|
|
| QEMU FWCfg device driver. |
|
|
| QEMU PCI serial device driver. |
|
|
| A paravirtualized display driver reduces CPU usage on the host and provides better performance through reduced network bandwidth on most workloads. |
|
|
| VirtIO Input Driver. |
|
|
| VirtIO RNG device driver. |
|
|
| VirtIO SCSI pass-through controller. |
|
|
| VirtIO Serial device driver. |
|
|
| VirtIO Block driver. |
| Agent | Description | Corresponding driver(s) | Value for ADDLOCAL |
|---|---|---|---|
| Spice Agent | Supports multiple monitors, responsible for client-mouse-mode support, reduces bandwidth usage, enables clipboard support between client and virtual machine, provide a better user experience and improved responsiveness. |
|
|
Examples
The following command installs only the VirtIO SCSI pass-through controller, the VirtIO Serial device driver, and the VirtIO Block driver:
D:\ msiexec /i "virtio-win-gt-x64.msi" /qn ADDLOCAL=`FE_vioscsi_driver,FE_vioserial_driver,FE_viostor_driver
The following command installs only the Spice Agent and its required corresponding drivers:
D:\ msiexec /i "virtio-win-gt-x64.msi" /qn ADDLOCAL = FE_spice_Agent,FE_vioserial_driver,FE_spice_driver
Additional resources
The Microsoft Developer website:
- Windows Installer
- Command-Line Options for the Windows installer
- Property Reference for the Windows installer
