Well I installed VMWare player here in the office just to give it a try and I noticed that doesn't quite work as flawlessly as I hoped either. I had to manually own all the disks (not quite sure about the right terminology here) to get it to start properly and even then I didn't appear to have a network connection which is why I'm trying to install it on my laptop. VMWare player appears to have some networking issues it seems and by not being able to tweak the NIC's getting the sim to run completely is not trivial, definitely not for somebody who's beginning to learn more like myself.
The thing that apparently hampers KVM the most is that the PCI ID's that KVM reports to the sim are not what it expects to see (eg. not the same as what ESX reports). One person on another forum about this subject said that PCI ID's cannot be tweaked, but I now have reason to believe that this is in fact possible, so that's another path you might want to consider (eg. get it to run on ESX, jot down the PCI ID's of the NIC and try if you can get KVM to pass on the identical PCI ID). Another try may be simply to switch the NIC from 'default' (for KVM the RTL8139 NIC), to the e1000 (default in qemu and therefore conceivably also in ESX?)
Just a few ideas I'm tossing around.
