I thought if you don't have it enabled kvm will not function.

You can also make things run faster by adding more video ram to the disk image. By default only 9mb is assigned. You have to do that in the xml file though for the specific vm.

Where are these XML files that tutorials talk about? I have yet to find that. Some tutorials even say to create it myself, but what do I put in it? I find the documentation is very lacking.

Anyway, I ended up giving up and went to VMware ESXi and VMs just fly now. Got it up and running in less than an hour, even got all my vlans working.

I can also make changes to the VM such as change the CD or network interface without having to shut down the VM for the changes to take effect. That was a big drawback I discovered afterwards while trying KVM.

The XML files can be used with/by libvirt and aren't part of KVM per se. You can create an XML file for an existing VM with virsh dumpxml, and a VM can be created from an XML file with virsh define.

I have to agree about the documentation being somewhat unclear. I found it to be quite thorough when it came to explaining each separate setting, but a complete sample file would have literally saved me hours of trial and error.

That's actually a pretty good description of my experiences with KVM over the last 6-8 years.

There's no drawback, as KVM allovs hotplugging of devices and media. You can do it with virsh, which actually has a half-decent help function.

But I'd have to agree that the GUIs in ESXi (and VirtualBox, for that matter) makes it much easier.

Then I'd assume you didn't ever check this. lsmod|grep kvm

I tend to use vmware's products and they are some of the best for commercial uses.

Yeah I had tried that, and the module was loaded (think it was called kvm_intel if I recall)

Though good to know that hot plugging is available through virsh. I just could not find any documentation saying how to do much in there and did not see any option. Everything seems to want a xml file but that's not really explained very well anywhere. Only snippets here and there but it's very vague.

One of these days I might look at writing a proper interface for kvm. Something that you can just point and click, like vmware, and with none of the limitations some of the existing ones like proxmox have (ex: not being able to read subfolders in the ISO folder). But now I just needed something up and running without messing around.

There should already be a few gui's for qemu/KVM.

From what I can tell, it has to do with compositing and transparencies. The only way I've found around it is to use Spice for accessing the VM. (I use proxmox, so it's pretty easy for me to do).