[[enabling-hardware-virtualization-support]]
= Enabling hardware virtualization support

This section covers setting up `libvirt` on your system. After setting up `libvirt`, you can create virtualized guest operating systems, also known as virtual machines.


[[system-requirements]]
== System requirements

To run virtualization on Fedora, you need:

* At least 600MB of hard disk storage per guest. A minimal command-line Fedora system requires 600MB of storage. Standard Fedora desktop guests require at least 3GB of space.

* At least 256MB of RAM per guest, plus 256MB for the base operating system. At least 756MB is recommended for each guest of a modern operating system. A good way to estimate this is to think about how much memory is required for the operating system normally, and allocate that amount to the virtualized guest.

KVM requires a CPU with virtualization extensions, found on most consumer CPUs. These extensions are called Intel VT or AMD-V. To check whether you have CPU support, run the following command:

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$ egrep '^flags.*(vmx|svm)' /proc/cpuinfo
----

If this command results in nothing printed, your system does not support the relevant virtualization extensions. You can still use QEMU/KVM, but the emulator will fall back to software virtualization, which is much slower.
