Hide Forgot
Description of problem: Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard For HP Proliant Servers (a HP custom OEM release media for Windows Server 2008) will not install as a guest OS under KVM on RHEL6 and possibly other versions as the installation probes the BIOS for information about the hardware and will fail if it does not consider the installation target compliant. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Install RHEL6 and KVM 2. Create a guest and attempt to install "Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard For HP Proliant Servers" 3. Actual results: The installation terminates with the error message "This system is not a supported platform" Expected results: A successful install Additional info: According to the HP website "OEM versions of Windows Server sold by HP will install on virtual machines providing the host BIOS information can be passed from the physical server to the virtual machine." and they have pointed me at the following links as examples of how VMware and Microsoft Hypervisor can be made to work. http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?objectID=c00970200&lang=en&cc=us&taskId=101&prodSeriesId=428936&prodTypeId=15351 http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?objectID=c01452454 Whilst qemu-kvm has some options available that may address this (-smbios options) it is not immediately obvious how these are best used.
Implementing this feature could mean migrating such virtual machines to non-HP hardware (or even to newer or older HP hardware) could randomly break for users. IMHO we need to think seriously whether or not it is a good idea to implement this feature request.
Note that libvirt present in RHEL-6.1 is gaining the equivalent facility to VMWare "SMBIOS.reflectHost=TRUE " where the QEmu-KVM emulation exposes the SMBIOS identification strings from the host. So if the Host do run on that specific kind of hardware this may be okay. It's just a matter of adding <smbios mode="host"/> to the domain XML before starting it. c.f. https://www.redhat.com/archives/libvir-list/2010-November/msg00123.html Daniel
And if you want to be migration safe, you can set <smbios mode="sysinfo"/>, and then provide data in the <sysinfo> block such that it will claim to be an HP machine, regardless of what vendor's hardware the guest is actually running on.