Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) is a virtual machine implementation using the operating system's kernel. This often allows for greater performance than when using virtual machine solutions which rely on user-space drivers.
Upon provisioning you'll have the option of either installing from a template or doing a manual install by ISO.
We recommend the templates whenever possible as they will include the latest updates and are slimmed down quite a bit.
Linux-based templates will prompt you for a password.
Windows-based templates will be syspreped and will ask you to setup an adminstrator user.
You must load the console and finish setup. You will also have to enable remote desktop from the Computer Properties page.
Some operating systems are walled off depending on how much memory you have.
Templates can help get around some of these limits since, for instance, CentOS will request 256MB+ RAM during installation but will only use < 20MB when bootup. For CentOS you will need to use a template.
To run Windows Server 2012 or higher you need at least a 1GB Slice or higher.
DHCP is hit or miss with KVM, if your networking fails to setup automatically please use the following information to configure it manually:
Here is a Debian example using ifupdown2:
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
address 205.185.113.2
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 205.185.113.1
iface eth0 inet6 static
address YOUR_IPV6_ADDRESS_HERE
netmask 48
gateway 2605:6400:20::1
iface eth0 inet6 static
address YOUR_IPV6_ADDRESS_HERE
netmask 48
gateway 2605:6400:10::1
iface eth0 inet6 static
address YOUR_IPV6_ADDRESS_HERE
netmask 48
gateway 2605:6400:30::1
iface eth0 inet6 static
address YOUR_IPV6_ADDRESS_HERE
netmask 48
gateway 2605:6400:40::1
Please set reasonable Pagefile/Swap sizes as excessive IO caused by abusing these will result in suspension, repeated abuse will result in termination without credit nor refund.
You may be unsatisfied or have noticed poor I/O performance due to the fact that all KVM based VPS are provisioned with IDE based disks by default, this is required as not all OS play well with the VIRTIO BUS, namely Windows.
The VIRTIO driver floppy is automatically mounted with your VPS during bootup time so be sure to select the drivers off this disk when installing Windows.
If your virtual server has 512MB RAM you'll likely suffer poor network performance due to strict default buffer sizes.
To get around this please add the follow to your /etc/sysctl.conf
net.core.rmem_max=16777216 net.core.wmem_max=16777216 net.ipv4.tcp_rmem=4096 87380 16777216 net.ipv4.tcp_wmem=4096 65536 16777216
Once you're done this be sure to sysctl -p to apply it.
These settings will automatically apply during restarts so you shouldn't need to cron/script anything else