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Re: [Xen-users] Guest O/S Questions

To: Mark Williamson <mark.williamson@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [Xen-users] Guest O/S Questions
From: Anthony Liguori <aliguori@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 24 Aug 2005 16:58:41 -0500
Cc: xen-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, Nick Couchman <Nick.Couchman@xxxxxxxxx>
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Mark Williamson wrote:

I have just recently discovered the XEN VMM and am trying to familiarize
myself with it.  I'm a newbe at it, so bear with me.

No probs, here goes...

I'd like to install an O/S onto a guest virtual machine.  Domain 0 is RHEL4
on Xen 2.0.7.  My question is how I would go about installing from a set of
distribution CD's (say RHEL4 or SUSE9) into a file-backed VMM.  Can anyone
help me out with this?

Installing into a file-backed VBD from a distro CD is tricky.

Actually, if you use QEMU to install the distro into a raw disk, and you only create one partition on the disk, you should be able to just use a command like this:

dd skip=63 bs=512 if=qemu.img of=xen.img

Keep in mind, I've not tried this myself :-)

Exporting the qemu image as /dev/hda in domU and just setting your parameters right seems to work well and is much simplier.

Regards,

Anthony Liguori

If you really want to use the distro CD then the easiest thing is to install into a spare partition and use that as your virtual machine disk. (it'll also perform better than a file-backed VBD)

Otherwise, debootstrap (Debian) and rpmstrap (works with Redhat, maybe Suse) may be worth looking at: just mount the loop file and use one of these programs to install into the directory.

Cheers,
Mark

Thanks,

Nick Couchman
Systems Integrator
SEAKR Engineering, Inc.
6221 South Racine Circle
Centennial, CO 80111
Main: (303) 790-8499
Fax: (303) 790-8720
Web: http://www.seakr.com

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