Though Linux is my desktop of choice, some of my programming tasks require me to run other operating systems. Rather than have multiple machines running various operating systems and/or a single machine with several boot partitions, I have in the past opted for virtualizing these other operating systems using VirtualBox under Linux. That is, until recently, when I switched from using VirtualBox to KVM/QEMU. There’s nothing wrong with VirtualBox, but for what I do, KVM made more sense. And since I’m running ZFS under Linux, using a zvol for the operating systems seemed a natural fit.

Creating a Windows 7 KVM/QEMU guest on a zvol under Linux is easy. First, create the zvol:

zfs create -p -V 60G rpool/kvm/windows7/disk0

This will create a 60GB zvol named windows7 in dataset kvm in the zpool named rpool. You can of course substitute the zpool/dataset names as you see fit.

With the zvol created, insert a copy of Windows 7 into your CD drive and create the guest:

qemu-system-x86_64 -enable-kvm -m 8192M -cpu host -drive file=/dev/zvol/rpool/kvm/windows7/disk0 -cdrom /dev/cdrom -boot d -smp 2


With any luck, qemu will start the Windows 7 installation. Just follow the instructions as you would a normal Windows installation.

Once installation is complete, you can use this command to start the Windows 7 guest:

qemu-system-x86_64 -enable-kvm -m 8192M -cpu host -drive file=/dev/zvol/rpool/kvm/windows7/disk0 -netdev user,id=vlan0 -net nic,model=e1000,netdev=vlan0 -smp 2


This will give your Windows 7 VM a network using DHCP, in which you can communicate from the VM to the outside world, but not the other way around. If you wish to be able to access your VM from the outside, you will need to use bridge networking instead, which you can read about in my future post.

That’s all there is to it!

Note that the -cpu host option is critical – if you forget it, the installation will give you the dreaded BSOD with a STOP 0x0000005D error. And to use the -cpu host option, you must also specify the -enable-kvm option.

If you’d prefer to install to an image file rather than a zvol, you can do that simply by creating the image using QEMU and then substituting the image file for the zvol:

qemu-img create -f qcow2 windows7.img 60G
qemu-system-x86_64 -enable-kvm -m 8192M -cpu host -drive file=windows7.img -cdrom /dev/cdrom -boot d -smp 2