Authors:

Feature pages are design documents that developers have created while collaborating on oVirt.

Most of them are outdated, but provide historical design context.

They are not user documentation and should not be treated as such.

Documentation is available here.

oVirt Windows Guest Tools ISO

oVirt Windows Guest Tools ISO has been deprecated and removed in oVirt 4.4 in favor of virtio-win ISO shipped with RHEL 8 and derivated distributions or on Fedora virito-win repo. The following section is kept only for reference.

Summary

This feature will add an ISO image with required drivers and agents for Windows based VMs.

Owner

Current status

  • Removed in oVirt 4.4

Detailed Description

The oVirt Guest Tool ISO provides a collection of tools usable for Windows VMs that run under KVM (oVirt). It also includes an installer to make the tools installation as easy as possible.

The oVirt Guest Tools Installer installs all VirtIO-Win device drivers (Balloon, Serial, Net, Block and SCSI) along with Spice Agent and QXL drivers.

Compatibility matrix:

OS VirtIO-Win drivers oVirt Agent Spice Agent Installer QXL
XP
2K3  
2K8
Win 7
2K8R2
Win 8  
2K12  
Win 8.1  
2K12R2  
Win 10
2K16  

QXL support is also declared on Download page and should be kept in sync with above matrix.

The installer is based on the Spice installer’s source code (http://cgit.freedesktop.org/~teuf/spice-nsis/) , and was slightly modifed for this project’s needs.

Important Note! Bug 1528652 Currently you can’t directly upgrade between the versions without either first stopping the services or performing an uninstall.

The current list of the software to be included in the ISO:

  • VirtIO-Win drivers:
    • VirtIO-Serial
    • VirtIO-Balloon
    • VirtIO-Net
    • VirtIO-Block
    • VirtIO-SCSI From:
  • Spice drivers and agent

    Important Note! It seems that Spice installer (current is spice-guest-tools-0.132.exe ) installs not just Spice related components (QXL and Agent), but all VirtIO-Win drivers as well.

  • Spice QXL for 32 and 64 bit Windows
  • Qemu Guest Agent
  • oVirt Guest Agent (Currently it is cross-compiled using Wine)

Benefit to oVirt

The ISO image will become a central repository for all the software that Windows based VMs require in order to function in most optimal way under oVirt / KVM.

The oVirt Guest Tools relies on the following dependencies:

Documentation / External references

Testing

Installation

  • Install oVirt Release RPM enabling oVirt repositories if you have not done so yet:

    yum install <http://resources.ovirt.org/pub/yum-repo/ovirt-release42.rpm>

  • Install oVirt Guest Tools package

    yum install ovirt-guest-tools-iso

  • Optional: The above will install the ISO in /usr/share/ovirt-guest-tools-iso/. Copy it to wherever you need it…

  • The ISO images are also available for download at http://resources.ovirt.org/pub/ovirt-4.2/iso/oVirt-toolsSetup/