KVM - Ubuntu Server requirements before Installing KVM and Guests

What are the requirements when installing the host Ubuntu Server (using 10.04 for now), before installing KVM and any Guests? Should all of the disk space be allocated during this install and then the Guests use a portion of it? Or can just part of the disk be used and then the Guest is assigned something out of what is left over (or even use space on a different disk)?

 

First you must make sure that your CPU supports hardware virtualization:

Code:

egrep '(vmx|svm)' --color=always /proc/cpuinfo

That depends on if you want to use image-based guests or guests that use LVM. If you want to use LVM-based guests, you need free, unpartitioned space on your hard drive(s), while image-based guests are created in existing partitions (see http://www.howtoforge.com/virtualization-with-kvm-on-ubuntu-11.10 ).