Tag Archives: kvm

Fedora x86_64 installer hanging on KVM hosts

Had an annoying problem today where a Fedora x86_64 guest wouldn’t install on my CentOS KVM server. Weirdly the i386 version had installed perfectly, but the x86_64 version would repeatedly crash and chew up heaps of CPU at the software … Continue reading

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KVM instances dying at boot

I recently encountered a crashing KVM instance, where my VM would die at boot once the bootloader tried to unpack initrd. A check of the log in /var/log/libvirt/qemu/vmname.log showed the following unhelpful line: Guest moved used index from 6 to … Continue reading

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Great server crash of 2012

In a twist of irony, shortly after boarding my flight in Sydney for my trip back to Wellington to escape the heat of the AU summer, my home NZ server crashed due to the massive 30 degree heatwave experienced in … Continue reading

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virt-viewer remote access tricks

Sometimes I need to connect directly to the console of my virtual machines, typically this is usually when working with development or experimental VMs where SSH/RDP/VNC isn’t working for whatever reason, or when I’m installing a new OS entirely. To … Continue reading

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How Jethro Geeks – IRL

A number of friends are always quite interested in how my personal IT infrastructure is put together, so I’m going to try and do one post a week ranging from physical environments, desktop, applications, server environments, monitoring and architecture. Hopefully … Continue reading

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Munin Performance

Munin is a popular open source network resource monitoring tool which polls the hosts on your network for statistics for various services, resources and other attributes. A typical deployment will see Munin being used to monitor CPU usage, memory usage, … Continue reading

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acpid trickiness

Ran into an issue last night with one of my KVM VMs not registering a shutdown command from the host server. This typically happens because the guest isn’t listening (or is configured to ignore) ACPI power “button” presses, so the … Continue reading

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Virtualbox Awesomeness

Work recently upgraded us to the latest MS Office edition for our platform. Most of our staff run MacOS, but we have a handful of Windows users and one dedicated Linux user (guess who?) who received MS Office 2010 for … Continue reading

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Impatient Linux geek’s review of Win8 preview

As you undoubtedly know, I’m one of Microsoft’s biggest fans [1], so I eagerly downloaded the newly released Windows 8 Developer Preview to take a look at what they’re aiming to with Windows 8. This post is just based on a quick … Continue reading

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KVM/libvirt change CDROM

I was setting up some Windows virtual machines this evening on my Linux KVM/libvirt server, in order to experiment with how Windows handles IPv6 networks. Installing windows was easy enough – standard virt-install commands, however post-reboot, Windows XP wants to … Continue reading

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