Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Quickly - XEN hypervisor and full virtualization

An interesting article about XEN hypervisor and support of full virtualization (or HVM) was published in the last Red Hat Magazine release. It summarizes three useful commands how to find if your system supports it (run these commands from dom0):
  • is your Intel CPU utilizing VT-x extension?
    • grep -i vmx /proc/cpuinfo
  • is your AMD CPU utilizing Secure Virtual machine (or SVM) extension?
    • grep -i svm /proc/cpuinfo
  • finally, is your XEN hypervisor capable of HVM?
    • grep -i hvm /sys/hypervisor/properties/capabilities
The previous commands aren't RHEL specific only. They have to work on any XEN installation. By the way, the /sys/hypervisor/ directory contains many other useful information. If you would like to find out which processors support HVM take a look at XEN wiki pages.

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