System Requirements - Red Hat ENTERPRISE LINUX 5 - VIRTUALIZATION GUIDE Manual

Chapter 1.

System requirements

This chapter lists system requirements for successfully running virtualization with Red Hat Enterprise
Linux. Virtualization is available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Server.
The requirements for virtualization vary depending on the type of hypervisor. The
Machine Xen
and hypervisors are provided with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. Both the KVM and Xen
Full
hypervisors support
For information on installing the virtualization packages, read
packages.
Minimum system requirements
• 6GB free disk space
• 2GB of RAM.
Recommended system requirements
• 6GB plus the required disk space recommended by the guest operating system per guest. For most
operating systems more than 6GB of disk space is recommended.
• One processor core or hyper-thread for each virtualized CPU and one for the hypervisor.
• 2GB of RAM plus additional RAM for virtualized guests.
KVM overcommit
KVM can overcommit physical resources for virtualized guests. Overcommiting resources
means the total virtualized RAM and processor cores used by the guests can exceed the
physical RAM and processor cores on the host. For information on safely overcommitting
resources with KVM refer to
Xen para-virtualization requirements
Para-virtualized guests require a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 installation tree available over the
network using the NFS, FTP or HTTP protocols.
Xen full virtualization requirements
Full virtualization with the Xen Hypervisor requires:
• an Intel processor with the Intel VT extensions,
• an AMD processor with the AMD-V extensions, or
• an Intel Itanium processor.
Section 31.6, "Verifying virtualization extensions"
Refer to
virtualization extensions.
virtualization. The Xen hypervisor also supports Para-virtualization.
Section 31.4, "Overcommitting with
Chapter 5, Installing the virtualization
KVM".
to determine if your processor has the
Kernel-based Virtual
3