Installation Wizard Screenshots

The first stage of the installation outlines what information the wizard will be collecting from the user over the steps which follow.

All guest VMs need to have a name, so that's the first piece of information collected from the user.

Virt Manager will detect what types of guests can be installed on the connection. Special hardware support is need to run most fully virtualized guests. Only certain hypervisors support paravirtualized guests.

Depending on the guest type chosen, different install options will be available. The supported methods are either PXE, network tree install (FTP, HTTP, or NFS), or local media (CDROM or ISO).

If a network URL or local media install is chosen, a seperate screen to enter the media path will be presented. A network URL install allows specifying kernel command line parameters.

For the root filesystem, it is possible to either use an existing physical device from the host (eg, a newly created LVM partition), or create a flat file and use that as a virtual block device. In the latter case the size must be specified, although the user can choose to create the disk as a sparse file (disk space allocated on an as-needed basis), or fully allocate the disk upon creation (this will take noticeably longer).

For devices which have very dynamic networking, it is not practical to bridge guest virtual machines to the real LAN via a shared physical device. When creating virtual machines is it thus neccessary to decide whether to attach the machine to a virtual network or a shared physical device.

The final step in the wizard is to decide what resources to allocate to the guest VM. This includes the total memory to allocate, as well as the amount of virtual cpus to attach.

All guest installs will be configured with a vnc console by default, which will pop up upon finishing the install setup. From here, install proceeds as though installing on a physical machine.