QEMU: Virtual Machine Manager (Part I)

Monday, July 23, 2007

One great package I found after installing Fedora 7 is the new existence of QEMU. This such toy never exist on previous Fedora series, AFAIK. QEMU is an alternative virtual machine (VM) available on Linux system. Another VM called VirtualBox had been personally reviewed couple weeks ago on my latest articles. This session talks about QEMU compared to VirtualBox in some aspects, including step-by-step, know-how, resource meter & others critical points. A scenario had been made with installing Windows XP SP2 on my laptop (Acer Travelmate 6291).

First of all, create a new virtual system by clicking File :: New Machine. A welcome window will appear, simply click Forward button to continue the next step.

Create the system name with your favorite name. Click Forward again to confirm.

Provide the Windows XP installation media in optical drive or browse the ISO image format type. Select Windows in OS Type combo box & Microsoft Windows XP as the variant. Note that if you select an ISO image source, you will be confused about missing installation media on next boot. I suggested to pick the real CD installation media.

Make storage space for installation process. If you had prepared an empty mounted physic volume of partition, select Normal Disk Partition & browse the device directory. On this case, I tried to create a virtual storage which has 1.5Gb space size. Click Allocate entire virtual disk now? to immediately allocate the total volume as the definitive storage.

As others VM implementing network connection to the host, QEMU also offered 2 option to choose which act as Virtual network or Shared physical device.

On next section, specify the memory configuration for VM. Assumed that my system has 512Mb of RAM, so I decided to set the VM Startup & Max Memory with 256Mb. I also identified that the VM will have 2 logical CPU, the same number of host logical CPU exist.