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I am trying to use virt-install to create a CentOS 7 virtual machine in a CentOS 7 host. Towards that end, I have been reading the virt-install documentation at the RHEL web site, and I have also been reading man virt-install and virt-install --help. I saw several types of syntax for the --disk argument in the documentation, so I picked one and came up with the syntax below, which is throwing an error. How can I create an appropriate virtual drive that can be used by the virt-install command?

Here is what I have so far:

[root@localhost home]# virt-install --name=public-centos7 --disk path=/home/publicvm --graphics none --vcpus=2 --memory=2048 --cdrom /media/usb/CentOS-7-x86_64-DVD-1503-01.iso --network bridge=br0 --os-type=linux --os-variant=rhel7.0

WARNING  CDROM media does not print to the text console by default, so you likely will not see text install output. You might want to use --location.See the man page for examples of using --location with CDROM media



Starting install...

ERROR    internal error: process exited while connecting to monitor: 2015-10-08T19:53:08.694875Z qemu-kvm: -drive file=/home/publicvm,if=none,id=drive-virtio-disk0,format=dir: 'dir' invalid format



Domain installation does not appear to have been successful.

If it was, you can restart your domain by running:

  virsh --connect qemu:///system start public-centos7

otherwise, please restart your installation.

[root@localhost home]# 

Note that /home/publicvm is just a directory within the partition mounted at /home. It uses the ext4 file system.

Note: The iso file is on a usb in ntfs format. I downloaded a library to enable CentOS 7 to mount the ntfs usb from the terminal, and I checked to make sure I could read the contents of /media/usb before running the above commands. I do not imagine that this is in any way relevant to the ERROR message about the drive, however, I am adding this due to the WARNING about the cdrom command above.

As discovered in chat, the solution is:

Copy your .ISO image to /var/lib/libvirt/images and run virt-install like so:

virt-install --name=public-centos7 

    --disk path=/home/publicvm/some.img,size=10 

    --graphics none 

    --vcpus=2 

    --memory=2048 

    --location /var/lib/libvirt/images/CentOS-7-x86_64-DVD-1503-01.iso 

    --network bridge=br0 

    --os-type=linux 

    --os-variant=rhel7.0 

    --extra-args console=ttyS0

If there is a failed previous attempt still running, you need to delete and undefine it first using virsh:

virsh destroy public-centos7

virsh undefine public-centos7