I have an ongoing inability to commit to a single virtualization platform because I’m always looking for one that has everything I need, is free and open source, and runs well on my dinosaur hardware.  Maybe I’ll post another time about my experiences with VMWare, Qemu, VirtualBox, and Xen.

Anyway, I just got a x86_64 KVM capable box from a co-worker that a is a few years old, but it is a few years newer than my existing hardware 🙂  I did a fresh install of Fedora 9, installed the Virtualization group, and set off to do a network install using virt-manager.  That was when I discovered that the shared physical device interface option was grayed out and couldn’t be used.

I went hunting around on Google for the solution, but didn’t find anything obvious right away.  In the end I found this excellent page: http://wiki.libvirt.org/page/Networking–oddly enough linked to in the comments of some instructions that didn’t work.  In all likelihood you do not need to do the  # cat > ifcfg-eth0 <<EOF step as you probably already have a working network card.  I did not add the iptables (firewall) rules either.

Now to get a rawhide tree that installs.  In the meantime I’m also experimenting with this very interest project: oVirt.

Update: This is still applicable for Fedora 14 and earlier.