In this post we will see if our hardware supports Virtualization with KVM/VMware ESXi server or not. The prerequisites are common for KVM/VMware virtualization’s. Below are some of the posts we already covered so far in our Virtualization series.

There are two mandatory hardware requirements for KVM/VMware ESXi server to get installed successfully.

  1. Hardware virtualization support in Host Processor is required
  2. The processor should be 64 bit processing.

Hardware virtualization support in Processor is required

In order KVM virtualization to work, the hardware should support virtualization. KVM is not like XEN virtualization which do a Paravirtualization. KVM requires complete commitment form hardware CPU to do virtualization.

Though your hardware supports KVM/VMware virtualization, we have to enable this future in our BIOS to make use of this capability. Please follow below screenshots on how to enable it.

KVM_virtualization_bios KVM_virtualization_VT-x

KVM_virtualiation_save_bios

Once you enable it and check if your VT-x/AMD-v settings as below.

To check if your processor is set with virtualization or not we have to search for vmx/svm in /proc/cpuinfo.

One Intel based machines:

Search for vmx if it support VT-x technology or not

grep vmx /proc/cpuinfo

Sample Output:

root@linuxnix.com:/dev# grep -o vmx /proc/cpuinfo
vmx
vmx
vmx
vmx

Note1: My machine is core2 duo so it’s showing 4 vmx entries.

One AMD based machines:

grep -o svm /proc/cpuinfo

That’s it once you get the outputs we are all set to install KVM software on your machine.

The processor should be 64 bit processing

For KVM to work the processor and OS should be of 64 bit. Please check our last post for this.

Minimum requirements for KVM virtualization on Host machine:

  • 6GB free harddisk disk space
  • 2GB of RAM.

Recommended system requirements for KVM virtualization on host machine :

  • 6GB plus the required disk space recommended by the guest operating system per guest.
  • One processor core or hyper-thread for each virtualised CPU and one for the hypervisor.
  • 2GB of RAM plus additional RAM for guests.

In next post we will see how to install KVM software on a Linux machine.

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Surendra Anne

Mr Surendra Anne is from Vijayawada, Andhra Pradesh, India. He is a Linux/Open source supporter who believes in Hard work, A down to earth person, Likes to share knowledge with others, Loves dogs, Likes photography. He works as Devops Engineer with Taggle systems, an IOT automatic water metering company, Sydney . You can contact him at surendra (@) linuxnix dot com.