Re: KVM on Debian

[Mark van Walraven <markv@netvalue.net.nz>]

On Thu, Jun 04, 2009 at 01:37:54PM -0700, Aaron Clausen wrote:
> I'm running a production Debian Lenny server using KVM to run a couple
> of Windows and a couple of Linux guests.  All is working well, but I
> want to give my Server 2003 guest access to a SCSI tape drive.
> Unfortunately, Debian is pretty conservative, and the version of KVM
> is too old to support this.  Is there a reasonably safe way of
> upgrading to one of the newer versions of KVM on this server?

I'm interested in this too, so far I have found that Lenny's libvirt fails
to parse the output of kvm --help, though this is fixed in the libvirt in
testing.  The kvm package from experimental seems to work well - after a
day of testing.

My next step is to try qemu-kvm, built from source.  The Debianised libvirt
expects the kvm binaries to be in /usr/bin/kvm, so you can symlink them
from /usr/local/bin if you prefer to install there.  I've also experimented
with shell script wrapper in /usr/bin/kvm that condenses the output of
qemu-kvm --help so that libvirtd for Lenny works.

Regards,

Mark.