Installing and Configuring CentOS to Host KVM Virtual Machines

GUI

When configuring a fresh install of CentOS for a KVM host machine (the main server that hosts all of the virtual machines), I like to run a GUI to make managing some of the virtual machines easier.  Thus, during install, choose the options for CentOS with Minimal GUI:

RAID 10 LVM Partitions

When configuring the hard drive partitions, set it up to use RAID 10 LVM SOFTWARE RAID:

Create volume group called "vms" without the quotes that is setup as RAID 10 (set volume group space to be as large as possible).

Set the "/" partition to 100GB XFS LVM (RAID10).

Set the "swap" partition to 32GB.

Only setup those two partitions.  The remaining space in the RAID 10 volume group "vms" will be used for KVM containers (and the remaining space does NOT need to be assigned to any mount points).

That's all.