Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 921114
Add a topic about using the VFD to install Windows on virtio devices
Last modified: 2017-05-11 08:37:44 EDT
Description of problem: The documentation doesn't mention it but in the Windows2008 directory, on the virtio drivers installation floppy, there's no disk driver. The one to be used is in the Windows2008R2 directory, but there's no mention about it in the docs. Is it possible to mention it somewhere?
Hey Daniele, Is this a case of, some of the drivers are in the Windows2008 directory, except for the disk driver, which is in the Windoows 2008R2 directory? Or its all in the same directory, but not the one some users might expect?
The Windows2008R2 directory contains disk and ethernet driver, while the Windows2008 directory only contains the ethernet driver. The disk driver contained in the Windows2008R2 is the one to be used on Windows2008. I see 2 possible solutions here: 1. let there be a copy of the file in both directories 2. document the fact that you need to use the disk driver contained in Windows2008R2
For the next release, I'd say we'll try and add a topic called: Installing Windows Drivers from the Virtual Floppy (or something like that) where we cover the contents of the floppy, and how to attach it to a virtual machine.
Related to: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=975634
Hey Daniele I've just checked in RHEVM 3.2 and 3.3, and this here is the contents of the virtio-win floppy disk image: [root@ecs-cloud-rhevm ~]# mount -o loop /usr/share/virtio-win/virtio-win.vfd /mnt RHEVM 3.2: [root@ecs-cloud-rhevm ~]# ls /mnt/amd64/ Win2003 Win2008 Win7 [root@ecs-cloud-rhevm ~]# ls /mnt/i386/ Win2003 Win2008 Win7 WinXP RHEVM 3.3: [root@localhost mnt]# ls i386/ Win2003 Win2008 Win7 Win8 WinXP [root@localhost mnt]# ls disk1 i386/ txtsetup.oem The directory mentioned in the original bug report doesn't seem to exist anymore. I'll still add a topic about using the virtio-win.vfd during Windows installations to use optimized virtual hardware drivers.
To address this bug, a new topic called: Installing Windows on Optimized Virtual Devices - The virtio-win.vfd floppy image contains Windows drivers for virtio optimized disk and network devices. Using these drivers instead of the emulated device drivers gives increased performance. - Task: Attaching the virtio-win.vfd floppy image to Windows virtual machines during installation. This content will be in the Virtual Machines chapter of the Administration Guide, after "8.4.6. Installing a Guest Operating System onto a Virtual Machine"
Typos fixed, thanks Alision.