Installation

Creating a disk image of 10G to hold ubuntu

 $ qemu-img create -f qcow2 Ubuntu_Xenial-amd64.img 30G

Confirm both disk image and ubuntu’s iso image at same directory

$ qemu-system-x86_64 -hda Ubuntu_Xenial-amd64.img -boot d 
  -cdrom ubuntu-16.04.3-server-amd64.iso -m 512 -enable-kvm

  • qemu-system-x86_64 – normal qemu command represented for x86_64 machine

  • -hda – refers to hard disk, here I used the 30G hard disk image

  • -boot [ a | c | d | n ] – boot from floppy disk(a), hard disk(c), cdrom(d), or etherboot(n). You may note that I used cdrom here. -cdrom – use iso image as cdrom to install ubuntu.

  • -m 512 – allocate RAM of 512 MB for the virtual machine.

  • -enable-kvm – enable KVM virtualization.

References

[1] https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/QEMU/Images

[2] https://smdaudhilbe.wordpress.com/2013/04/11/how-to-install-ubuntu-inside-qemu-emulator-and-make-a-virtual-machine/