If things are running smoothly, things might get really nasty. Today’s special: KVM on CentOS 5.4

My plan was giving KVM a shot for virtualizing a couple of machines. So I inserted the CentOS CD and did a network install, added KVM and Virt-Manager.

Things really went smooth so far and I was about to think that I had success – but that’s exactly the time where Murphy hit me: Virt-Manager complained about an unknown version of QEMU and I started to wonder. To make sure that I got the right version installed, I started to check the binary:

# /usr/libexec/qemu-kvm -help
/usr/libexec/qemu-kvm: error while loading shared libraries: libspice.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
# ldd /usr/libexec/qemu-kvm | grep libspice
libspice.so.0 => not found

After all, it’s a missing library that prevents Qemu from starting up and Virt-Manager didn’t find a version string in that error message and bailed out. The missing library is libspice.so.0 which can be found in the qspice-libs package. After installing that one, Qemu was able to run and Virt-Manager was happy again – and so am I…