There are surprisingly few resources on this on teh intarwebs, so just some notes for my future self and anyone else attempting it. If you are wondering why I want to run a Windows 7 virtual machine – it’s because we need a server to run the MiSeq reporter and RTA on, in order to reanalyse runs.
Make sure you belong to libvirt and kvm groups.
This gives you an 8-CPU virtual server with 24Gb of RAM ready to boot the Windows 7 installer DVD.
virsh ‘destroy WIN7′
virsh ‘undefine WIN7′
virt-install –connect qemu:///system \
–arch=x86_64 \
-n WIN7 \
-r 24000 \
–vcpus 8 \
–vnc \
–vnclisten 0.0.0.0 \
–noautoconsole \
–os-type windows \
–os-variant win7 \
–disk path=/home/nick/windows_partition \
–disk path=/home/nick/virtio-win-0.1-30.iso,device=cdrom,perms=ro \
–cdrom /home/nick/win7.iso \
–boot cdrom,hd \
–prompt
Virtio drivers via Fedora Project.
Update 30/07
To get 8 cores working correctly, you need to add a topology entry to the XML definition using virsh edit:
<cpu> <topology sockets='1' cores='4' threads='2'/> </cpu>