Red Hat Training

A Red Hat training course is available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux

6.4. Installing KVM packages on an existing Red Hat Enterprise Linux system

The section describes the steps for installing the KVM hypervisor on a working Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 system.
Adding packages to your list of Red Hat account entitlements

This section describes how to enable entitlements in your Red Hat account for the virtualization packages. You need these entitlements enabled to install and update the virtualization packages on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. You require a valid Red Hat account in order to install virtualization packages on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

If you do not have a valid Red Hat subscription, visit the Red Hat online store.
Installing the KVM hypervisor with yum

To use virtualization on Red Hat Enterprise Linux you require the kvm package. The kvm package contains the KVM kernel module providing the KVM hypervisor on the default Red Hat Enterprise Linux kernel.

To install the kvm package, run:
# yum install kvm
Now, install additional virtualization management packages.
Install the other recommended virtualization packages:
# yum install virt-manager libvirt libvirt-python python-virtinst