KVM is available as part of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL 6, Update 1, 2) and also as a separate bare-metal stand-alone hypervisor, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor (RHEV-H). Management for KVM is either provided through the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager (RHEV-M) or through separate RPMs that can be downloaded into the standard RHEL 6, Update 1, 2 installations. This installation and usage guide is focused on using KVM based virtualization as provided through the RHEL 6, Update 1, 2 distributions.

The virt-manager tool provides a very simple, easy-to-use and intuitive GUI interface for all virtual machine operations, along with virt-viewer. A command line alternative, virsh, also provides a shell that can be used to create and manage virtual machines using a rich set of commands. The features provided by these tools include taking snapshots of virtual machines, creating virtual networks and live migration of virtual machines to another KVM host.

Once you have configured the required hardware setup:

For RHEL 6, Update 1, 2 installation information:

http://www.redhat.com/virtualization/rhev/server/library/

For a full set of features and capabilities, please refer to the Red Hat documentation.

See Additional documentation.