2.2. Enabling virtualization on IBM Z
To set up a KVM hypervisor and create virtual machines (VMs) on an IBM Z system running RHEL 9, follow the instructions below.
Conditions préalables
The following minimum system resources are available:
- 6 GB free disk space for the host, plus another 6 GB for each intended VM.
- 2 GB of RAM for the host, plus another 2 GB for each intended VM.
- 4 CPUs on the host. VMs can generally run with a single assigned vCPU, but Red Hat recommends assigning 2 or more vCPUs per VM to avoid VMs becoming unresponsive during high load.
- Your IBM Z host system is using a z13 CPU or later.
RHEL 9 is installed on a logical partition (LPAR). In addition, the LPAR supports the start-interpretive execution (SIE) virtualization functions.
To verify this, search for
siein your/proc/cpuinfofile.# grep sie /proc/cpuinfo/ features : esan3 zarch stfle msa ldisp eimm dfp edat etf3eh highgprs te sie
Procédure
Install the virtualization packages:
# dnf install qemu-kvm libvirt virt-installStart the virtualization services:
# for drv in qemu network nodedev nwfilter secret storage interface; do systemctl start virt${drv}d{,-ro,-admin}.socket; done
Vérification
Verify that your system is prepared to be a virtualization host.
# virt-host-validate [...] QEMU: Checking if device /dev/kvm is accessible : PASS QEMU: Checking if device /dev/vhost-net exists : PASS QEMU: Checking if device /dev/net/tun exists : PASS QEMU: Checking for cgroup 'memory' controller support : PASS QEMU: Checking for cgroup 'memory' controller mount-point : PASS [...]If all virt-host-validate checks return a
PASSvalue, your system is prepared for creating VMs.If any of the checks return a
FAILvalue, follow the displayed instructions to fix the problem.If any of the checks return a
WARNvalue, consider following the displayed instructions to improve virtualization capabilities.
Résolution de problèmes
If KVM virtualization is not supported by your host CPU, virt-host-validate generates the following output:
QEMU: Checking for hardware virtualization: FAIL (Only emulated CPUs are available, performance will be significantly limited)
However, VMs on such a host system will fail to boot, rather than have performance problems.
To work around this, you can change the
<domain type>value in the XML configuration of the VM toqemu. Note, however, that Red Hat does not support VMs that use theqemudomain type, and setting this is highly discouraged in production environments.
Ressources supplémentaires
