Xen guest install

After your guest has completed its initial boot, the standard installation process for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 starts. Using virt-manager. Alternatively, run the virt-manager command as root. Select the Xen hypervisor connection.

Note that presently the KVM hypervisor is named qemu. If you have not already done so, connect to a hypervisor. Open the File menu and select the Add Connection Once a hypervisor connection is selected the New button becomes available. Clicking the New button starts the virtual machine creation wizard, which explains the steps that follow. Provide a name for your virtualized guest.

Select the appropriate virtualization method. The following example uses Para-virtualization. Select the appropriate installation method. In this example, use the Network install tree method. Any other location may require additional configuration for SELinux. Assign a physical storage device Block device or a file-based image File. Assign sufficient space for your virtualized guest and any applications the guest requires. Now restart networking for a remote machine, make sure you have a backup way to access the host if this fails :.

If all is well, the bridge will be listed and your interface will appear in the interfaces column:. If the bridge isn't operating correctly, go back and check the edits to the interfaces file very carefully.

Reboot before continuing. During the reboot, note the list of OS choices and check to see what the default start-up choice is. If both the start-up default is fine, skip the next section and go directly to Basic Xen Project Commands.

GRUB, the bootloader installed during installation, tells the computer which operating system to start and how. To use the hypervisor, Xen must be started before the operating system. So, if Xen was, say, the third OS choice, change the line to. Before we dive into creating some guest domains we will quickly cover some basic commands.

In the examples below, we use xl command line tool. Older versions of the Xen Project software used the xm command line tool. If, for example, you come across "xm" while reading old documentation, say, just substitute "xl". This can be used to visualize CPU, memory usage and block device access. Debian contains a number of tools for creating Xen Project guests, the easiest of which is known as xen-tools.

In this guide we are going to use xen-tools to prepare a Debian paravirtualized domU. This however is bad for maintainability guests cannot upgrade their kernels without access to the dom0 and is not as flexible in terms of boot options as they must be passed via the config file. The Xen Project community wrote a utility known as pygrub which is a python application for PV guests that enables the dom0 to parse the GRUB configuration of the domU and extract its kernel, initrd and boot parameters.

This allows for kernel upgrades etc inside of our guest machines along with a GRUB menu. Using pygrub or the stub-dom implementation known as pv-grub is best practice for starting PV guests.

We can now create a guest operating system with this tool. It effectively automates the process of setting up a PV guest from scratch right to the point of creating config files and starting the guest. The process can be summarized as follows:. These 9 steps can be carried out manually but the manual process is outside the scope of this guide. We instead will execute the below command for --dist you could in place of Wheezy e.

This command instructs xen-create-image the primary binary of the xen-tools toolkit to create a guest domain with MB of memory, 2 vcpus, using storage from the vg0 volume group we created, use DHCP for networking, pygrub to extract the kernel from the image when booted and lastly we specify that we want to deploy a Debian Wheezy operating system.

This process will take a few minutes. Once it is complete, it will provide a summary of the installation. Take note of the root password for the guest.

Not every distribution provides the xen-tools package for an automated PV creation and configuration, and some Xen users prefer more control of the setup process. Alpine Linux is such a distro. The -c in this command tells xl that we wish to connect to the guest virtual console, a paravirtualized serial port within the domain that xen-create-image configured to listen with a getty. This is analogous to running:. That completes our section on setting up your first paravirtualized domain!

HVM guests are quite a bit different to their PV counterparts. Because they require the emulation of hardware there are more moving pieces that need to be configured etc. The main point worth mentioning here is that HVM requires the emulation of ATA, Ethernet and other devices, while virtualized CPU and Memory access is performed in hardware to achieve good performance. Because of this the default emulated devices are very slow and we generally try to use PV drivers within HVM domains.

We will be installing a set of Windows PV drivers that greatly increase performance once we have our Windows guest running.

First, create the new logical volume - name the volume "windows", set the size to 20GB and use the volume group vg0 we created earlier. Once you have installed Windows by formatting the disk and by following the prompts the domain will restart - however this time we want to prevent it booting from DVD so destroy the domain with.

Reconnect with VNC and finish the installation. Signed drivers can be obtained from Univention's website. Many thanks for Univention for making signed drivers available to the Xen Project community and of course a massive thanks to James for all his work on making Windows in guest VMs such a smooth experience. On finalizing the installation and rebooting you should notice much improved disk and network performance and the hypervisor will now be able to gracefully shutdown your Windows domains.

Another slightly different version of James Harper's drivers can be found here. If this does not work try it without the port number and if you are trying from a GUI on dom0, try specifying localhost instead of the dom0 ip:. You can now move onto building your own guest images or try out some prebuilt Guest VM Images. Jump to: navigation , search. Personal tools Create account Log in. In the previous chapters we explored the creation and management of Xen guest operating systems using the virt-manager graphical tool.

In this chapter we will cover the installation of a Xen guest operating system using the virt-install' command-line tool. This chapter assumes that the Xen kernel is running and that the system hardware supports Xen virtualization.

This is achieved through use of VNC. If graphics support is declined during the virt-install session, the standard text based installer will be used. If you prefer to use the graphical installer for the guest operating system it is necessary to ensure that the vncviewer is installed, otherwise virt-install will fail to create the new guest system.