2.2. Hypervisor Requirements
2.2.1. CPU Requirements
Table 2.4. Supported Hypervisor CPU Models
AMD | Intel | IBM |
---|---|---|
AMD Opteron G1 | Intel Conroe | IBM POWER8 |
AMD Opteron G2 | Intel Penryn | |
AMD Opteron G3 | Intel Nehalem | |
AMD Opteron G4 | Intel Westmere | |
AMD Opteron G5 | Intel Sandybridge | |
Intel Haswell |
Procedure 2.1. Checking if a Processor Supports the Required Flags
- At the Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Red Hat Virtualization Host boot screen, press any key and select the Boot or Boot with serial console entry from the list.
- Press Tab to edit the kernel parameters for the selected option.
- Ensure there is a Space after the last kernel parameter listed, and append the
rescue
parameter. - Press Enter to boot into rescue mode.
- At the prompt which appears, determine that your processor has the required extensions and that they are enabled by running this command:
# grep -E 'svm|vmx' /proc/cpuinfo | grep nx
If any output is shown, then the processor is hardware virtualization capable. If no output is shown, then it is still possible that your processor supports hardware virtualization. In some circumstances manufacturers disable the virtualization extensions in the BIOS. If you believe this to be the case, consult the system's BIOS and the motherboard manual provided by the manufacturer.
2.2.2. Memory Requirements
Table 2.5. Memory Requirements
Minimum | Maximum |
---|---|
2 GB of RAM | 2 TB of RAM |
2.2.3. Storage Requirements
Table 2.6. Red Hat Virtualization Host Minimum Storage Requirements
/ | /boot | /var | swap | Minimum Total |
---|---|---|---|---|
6 GB | 1 GB | 15 GB | 1 GB | 23 GB |
Important
2.2.4. PCI Device Requirements
2.2.5. Hardware Considerations For Device Assignment
- CPU must support IOMMU (for example, VT-d or AMD-Vi). IBM POWER8 supports IOMMU by default.
- Firmware must support IOMMU.
- CPU root ports used must support ACS or ACS-equivalent capability.
- PCIe device must support ACS or ACS-equivalent capability.
- It is recommended that all PCIe switches and bridges between the PCIe device and the root port should support ACS. For example, if a switch does not support ACS, all devices behind that switch share the same IOMMU group, and can only be assigned to the same virtual machine.
- For GPU support, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 supports PCI device assignment of NVIDIA K-Series Quadro (model 2000 series or higher), GRID, and Tesla as non-VGA graphics devices. Currently up to two GPUs may be attached to a virtual machine in addition to one of the standard, emulated VGA interfaces. The emulated VGA is used for pre-boot and installation and the NVIDIA GPU takes over when the NVIDIA graphics drivers are loaded. Note that the NVIDIA Quadro 2000 is not supported, nor is the Quadro K420 card.
lspci -v
command can be used to print information for PCI devices already installed on a system.