There’s not too much documentation out there on how to go about enabling Kernel Virtual Machines on RHEL5.4 (even though it’s one of the new features of RHEL5.4). Maybe this will help someone else. This is the list of RPMs (from the RHEL DVD) I had to install to make it work on my machine:

rpm -ivh etherboot-zroms-kvm-5.4.4-10.el5.x86_64.rpm
rpm -ivh kmod-kvm-83-105.el5.x86_64.rpm
rpm -ivh celt051-0.5.1.3-0.el5.x86_64.rpm
rpm -ivh log4cpp-1.0-4.el5.x86_64.rpm
rpm -ivh qpixman-0.13.3-4.el5.x86_64.rpm
rpm -ivh qcairo-1.8.7.1-3.el5.x86_64.rpm
rpm -ivh qffmpeg-libs-0.4.9-0.15.20080908.el5.x86_64.rpm
rpm -ivh qspice-libs-0.3.0-39.el5.x86_64.rpm
rpm -ivh kvm-83-105.el5.x86_64.rpm
rpm -ivh cyrus-sasl-md5-2.1.22-5.el5.x86_64.rpm
rpm -ivh iscsi-initiator-utils-6.2.0.871-0.10.el5.x86_64.rpm
rpm -ivh bridge-utils-1.1-2.x86_64.rpm
rpm -ivh kvm-qemu-img-83-105.el5.x86_64.rpm
rpm -ivh gnome-python2-gnomekeyring-2.16.0-3.el5.x86_64.rpm
rpm -ivh gtk-vnc-0.3.8-3.el5.x86_64.rpm
rpm -ivh gtk-vnc-python-0.3.8-3.el5.x86_64.rpm
rpm -ivh xen-libs-3.0.3-94.el5.x86_64.rpm
rpm -ivh xen-devel-3.0.3-94.el5.x86_64.rpm
rpm -ivh libvirt-0.6.3-20.el5.x86_64.rpm
rpm -ivh virt-viewer-0.0.2-3.el5.x86_64.rpm
rpm -ivh libvirt-python-0.6.3-20.el5.x86_64.rpm
rpm -ivh python-virtinst-0.400.3-5.el5.noarch.rpm
rpm -ivh virt-manager-0.6.1-8.el5.x86_64.rpm

Then I ran these commands:

chkconfig –levels 2345 haldaemon on
service haldaemon start

Later, to get convirt running, I had to install these additional packages:

kernel-xen-2.6.18-164.el5
xen-3.0.3-94.el5
gpg-pubkey-32a349c9-493c185a
socat-1.6.0.1-1.el5.rf
tunctl-1.5-2.el5
python-crypto-2.0.1-13.1.el5.kb.1
python-paramiko-1.7.4-1.el5
convirt-1.1-1.fedora