Guest Operating System Information

Guest operating system identity for the VirtualMachineInstance will be provided by the label kubevirt.io/os :

metadata:
  name: myvmi
  labels:
    kubevirt.io/os: win2k12r2

The kubevirt.io/os label is based on the short OS identifier from libosinfo database. The following Short IDs are currently supported:

Short ID	Name	Version	Family	ID
win2k12r2	Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2	6.3	winnt	https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/evaluate-windows-server-2012-r2

Use with presets

A VirtualMachineInstancePreset representing an operating system with a kubevirt.io/os label could be applied on any given VirtualMachineInstance that have and match the kubevirt.io/os label.

Default presets for the OS identifiers above are included in the current release.

Windows Server 2012R2 VirtualMachineInstancePreset Example

apiVersion: kubevirt.io/v1
kind: VirtualMachineInstancePreset
metadata:
  name: windows-server-2012r2
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      kubevirt.io/os: win2k12r2
spec:
  domain:
    cpu:
      cores: 2
    resources:
      requests:
        memory: 2G
    features:
      acpi: {}
      apic: {}
      hyperv:
        relaxed: {}
        vapic: {}
        spinlocks:
          spinlocks: 8191
    clock:
      utc: {}
      timer:
        hpet:
          present: false
        pit:
          tickPolicy: delay
        rtc:
          tickPolicy: catchup
        hyperv: {}
---
apiVersion: kubevirt.io/v1
kind: VirtualMachineInstance
metadata:
  labels:
    kubevirt.io/os: win2k12r2
  name: windows2012r2
spec:
  terminationGracePeriodSeconds: 0
  domain:
    firmware:
      uuid: 5d307ca9-b3ef-428c-8861-06e72d69f223
    devices:
      disks:
      - name: server2012r2
        disk:
          dev: vda
  volumes:
    - name: server2012r2
      persistentVolumeClaim:
        claimName: my-windows-image

Once the `VirtualMachineInstancePreset` is applied to the
`VirtualMachineInstance`, the resulting resource would look like this:

apiVersion: kubevirt.io/v1
kind: VirtualMachineInstance
metadata:
  annotations:
    presets.virtualmachineinstances.kubevirt.io/presets-applied: kubevirt.io/v1
    virtualmachineinstancepreset.kubevirt.io/windows-server-2012r2: kubevirt.io/v1
  labels:
    kubevirt.io/os: win2k12r2
  name: windows2012r2
spec:
  terminationGracePeriodSeconds: 0
  domain:
    cpu:
      cores: 2
    resources:
      requests:
        memory: 2G
    features:
      acpi: {}
      apic: {}
      hyperv:
        relaxed: {}
        vapic: {}
        spinlocks:
          spinlocks: 8191
    clock:
      utc: {}
      timer:
        hpet:
          present: false
        pit:
          tickPolicy: delay
        rtc:
          tickPolicy: catchup
        hyperv: {}
    firmware:
      uuid: 5d307ca9-b3ef-428c-8861-06e72d69f223
    devices:
      disks:
      - name: server2012r2
        disk:
          dev: vda
  volumes:
    - name: server2012r2
      persistentVolumeClaim:
        claimName: my-windows-image

For more information see VirtualMachineInstancePresets

HyperV optimizations

KubeVirt supports quite a lot of so-called "HyperV enlightenments", which are optimizations for Windows Guests. Some of these optimization may require an up to date host kernel support to work properly, or to deliver the maximum performance gains.

KubeVirt can perform extra checks on the hosts before to run Hyper-V enabled VMs, to make sure the host has no known issues with Hyper-V support, properly expose all the required features and thus we can expect optimal performance. These checks are disabled by default for backward compatibility and because they depend on the node-feature-discovery and on extra configuration.

To enable strict host checking, the user may expand the featureGates field in the KubeVirt CR by adding the HypervStrictCheck to it.

apiVersion: kubevirt.io/v1
kind: Kubevirt
metadata:
  name: kubevirt
  namespace: kubevirt
spec:
  ...
  configuration:
    developerConfiguration:
      featureGates:
        - "HypervStrictCheck"

Alternatively, users can edit an existing kubevirt CR:

kubectl edit kubevirt kubevirt -n kubevirt

...
spec:
  configuration:
    developerConfiguration:
      featureGates:
        - "HypervStrictCheck"
        - "CPUManager"