I need a SLES 11 system for porting some software for a client. I got the DVD and tried to install in [kvm]{tag/kvm}.

First, I was pleasantly surprised that, like [Debian]{tag/debian}, [SuSE]{tag/suse} now supports virtio disks (/dev/vda) right from the installer. So far so good.

However, both SLES 11 and OpenSuse 11 fail to install because grub crashes. I tried booting the SuSE cd into “rescue” mode and tries to install grub manually using the chroot trick. Same thing, grub seg faults.

I ran into a strange NFS + KVM issue. Every so often under heavy NFS load my KVM client would hang retrying the nfs server. On the console the client was showing:

    nfs: server host not responding, still trying

I found this bug post which does not seem to have been resolved in 2.6.24.

Using the kvm flag -net nic,model=rtl8139 fixed the problem for me.