Issue

I have an HP server that came with an OEM copy of Windows Server 2008. I have installed CentOS 5.4 on the hardware and am trying to install Windows Server 2008 as a KVM guest. When I attempt to install Windows Server 2008 it complains that I am trying to install on unsupported hardware. This issue is caused because the hardware SMBIOS information is not being passed to the KVM guest.

Background

Before I go any further I want to state that what I am trying to do is within the license. HP offers a supported solution for VMWare but does not have an official solution for KVM. After much research the platform I am going to use is CentOS and KVM so please do not suggest other platforms.

I emailed the KVM developers mailing list and was told that this is possible and was given the advice that:

"You can dump SLIC table of your host bios and provide it to guest bios using -acpitable parameter."

I used dmidecode and got the parameters that need to be passed, but I do not know where to pass the parameters into.

Update

Looks like CentOS 5.4 uses virt-install instead of qemu. Qemu is in the package manager and I was able to install it after uninstalling qemu-img (they conflict and qemu contains the packages in qemu-img). So now I know how to pass the acpitable parameters, but I am having trouble mapping what came out of dmidecode into -acpitable.