QEMU guest agent is an important component for a virtual machine running on Oracle Linux KVM and managed by Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager.

The same allows to get virtual machine information and statistics on the Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager web UI, like:

  • IP address(es) of the virtual machine
  • Resource utilization (CPU and Memory) statistics

and allows to get consinstent snapshot(s) of the Windows virtual machines while the same is running.

The QEMU guest agent does not replace the “VirtIO drivers”, instead used and leveraged to grant the best performance for Microsoft Windows while running on Oracle Linux KVM; if you’re looking for those drivers, you should check at:

Here the steps on how to:

  • Download the QEMU guest agent for Microsoft Windows from Oracle Linux Yum channel
  • Extract the content of the RPM to get access to the Windows executable files (.msi)
  • Build an ISO containing those packges for MS Windows 32bit and 64bit
  • Import the ISO by Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager and get the same available to the Oracle Linux KVM infrastructure

The steps executed below are executed on the Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager machine but can be executed on any Oracle Linux 8 system.

  • Download the proper binary to create ISOs on an Oracle Linux 8 system

# dnf install genisoimage -y

  • Download the QEMU guest agent for Microsoft Windows

# mkdir tmp
# cd tmp
# wget https://yum.oracle.com/repo/OracleLinux/OL9/appstream/x86_64/getPackage/qemu-ga-win-103.0.0-1.el9_0.noarch.rpm

  • Extract the content of the RPM to get access to the Windows executable files (.msi)

# rpm2cpio ./qemu-ga-win-103.0.0-1.el9_0.noarch.rpm |cpio -idmv
# mkdir ../build
# find -iname '*.msi' -exec cp {} ../build/ \;

  • Build an ISO containing those drivers

# mkisofs -R -o ../qemu-ga-windows.iso ../build/*
# ll ../qemu-ga-windows.iso   -rw-r--r--. 1 root root 19007488 Sep 26 16:42 ../qemu-ga-windows.iso

  • Import the ISO on your Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager and Oracle Linux KVM infrastructure

To import the ISO on your OL-KVM infrastructure, just upload the same ISO with your client by the OLVM web interface:

upload ISO image

Once the ISO is avaialble, get the same presented to your Windows virtual machine(s) to then install the QEMU guest-agent package.