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A few days ago I wanted to try out Windows 2003 (to be used for a task at the university) in KVM, to be exact using libvirt. First I didn’t do any non-intuitive trick, but later it turned out what virtio should be enabled for the block devices or the whole machine will be slow as hell. For the records, here is what worked for me:
wget http://alt.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/virtio-win/latest/images/bin/virtio-win-1.1.16.vfd
virt-install --name=vmiklos-w2003 --arch=x86_64 --vcpus=1 --ram=2048 \
--os-type=windows --os-variant=win2k3 --connect=qemu:///system \
--network network=default \
--cdrom=/virt/vmiklos-w2003/en_windows_server_2003_with_sp1_enterprise.iso \
--disk path=/virt/vmiklos-w2003/vmiklos-w2003.img,size=24,bus=virtio \
--disk path=/virt/vmiklos-w2003/virtio-win-1.1.16.vfd,device=floppy \
--accelerate --vnc --noautoconsole --keymap=usWhen the installer asks if you have a special SCSI driver floppy, ask for it, then you can select the virtio driver.