Chapter 65. Virtualization

Attempting to boot a guest virtual machine that uses the Open Virtual Machine Firmware (OVMF) on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux host using the qemu-kvm package currently fails, with the guest becoming unresponsive and displaying a blank screen. (BZ#1174132)

When installing Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 from other sources than the network, network device names are not specified by default in the interface configuration files (this is done with a DEVICE= line). As a consequence, creating a network bridge by using the virsh iface-bridge command fails with an error message. To work around the problem, add DEVICE= lines into the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-* files.

For more information, see the Red Hat Knowledgebase: https://access.redhat.com/solutions/2792701 (BZ#1100588)

When running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 guests with 12 GB RAM or above on a VMware ESXi 5.5 hypervisor, certain components currently initialize with incorrect memory type range register (MTRR) values or incorrectly reconfigure MTRR values across boots. This sometimes causes the guest kernel to panic or the guest to become unresponsive during boot.

To work around this problem, add the disable_mtrr_trim option to the guest's kernel command line, which enables the guest to continue booting when MTRRs are configured incorrectly. Note that with this option, the guest prints WARNING: BIOS bug messages during boot, which you can safely ignore. (BZ#1429792)

The oscap-anaconda-addon module is currently not able to properly parse the STIG for Red Hat Virtualization Hypervisor security hardening profile. As a consequence, the profile's name is shown as DISA STIG for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 or United States Government Configuration Baseline (USGCB / STIG) - DRAFT in the Anaconda interface selection. However, this is only a display problem, and you can safely use the DISA STIG for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 profile instead of the STIG for Red Hat Virtualization Hypervisor profile. (BZ#1437106)