On Thu, May 05, 2011 at 04:53:22PM -0400, Martes G Wigglesworth wrote:
On 05/05/2011 09:09 AM, Pasi Kärkkäinen wrote:
It sounds like your hardware does not have HVM support, which means you can only run PV VMs.
Thanks for the reply.
You are correct.
I have two P4 32-bit machines that I just picked up and wanted to use them for testing until I can afford to upgrade to the 12-core MB/Processors that I bought these 2u chassis into which I plan to install.
I have never used xen, and it just seems kind of odd that you cannot simply install from the hard drive, like on virtualbox. Anyhow, I could only figure that was the outlying factor.
I could not locate that aspect of the virt-manager docs, so I will check again.
Not being able to install from ISO image as PV VM is a virt-manager limitation. (and partly centos/rhel distro limitation).
Anyhow, now I am fighting with SL-Linux's installation media for i386, having the ability to be seen, and booted, but inside their own boot menue, it forces you to re-verify that you have install media. (Even though it is running from the media in the first place. Then Xen magically can't see the iso that SL linux is running from.)
Are there any good (I guess dated, now that everything is mulit-core) docs on how to work with paravirtualization, since I have to deal with this weird "network" install setup? It seems that I can put in the explicit path to the local-disk-installed ISO image, but the second it boots, nothing can be found, and it asks me to put in a url, etc...
RHEL/CentOS docs have examples... http://docs.redhat.com/docs/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/5/html/Virtualiza...
cmdline virt-install example to install PV RHEL5/CentOS5: http://docs.redhat.com/docs/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/5/html/Virtualiza...
Fedora can be installed as Xen PV VM in the same way.. just give fedora mirror URL instead of RHEL/CentOS mirror URL.
I know this sounds incoherent, but I am burnt out from exams.
Installation for PV (paravirtualized) VMs is only supported by using netinstall in virt-manager.
HVM (fully virtualized) VMs can be installed from ISO image.
Thanks for the input, and would appreciate any further direction on reading further on "real-world" installs, not the docs where they assume you have a quad 12-core processor super server so "everything thing just works in virtualmode... ) I guess this is more for virt-manager, but I think you will understand what I mean if you check the doc site for virt manager. They don't even mention that there is a limitation such as what you have described, except to say "there is a limitation."
Sorry for the ramble. Need more RedBull, or maybe not so much???? Lol..
Hehe.
You can also use other tools than virt-manager/virt-install to install VMs.
- debootstrap to install Debian/Ubuntu VMs. - thirdparty "xen-tools" to install Debian/Ubuntu VMs. - febootstrap to install fedora. - various chroot tricks to install rpm-based distros. - Fedora native installer, by downloading the fedora installer pxeboot kernel + initrd and booting them as xen pv domU. - Debian/Ubuntu native installer, by downloading the debian 6.0 or ubuntu 10.04 installer netinstall kernel + initrd and booting them as xen pv domU.
See the end of the tutorial for an example how to install ubuntu manually using the distro installer: http://wiki.xen.org/xenwiki/Fedora13Xen4Tutorial
-- Pasi