--- On Wed, 6/16/10, Steve Campbell campbell@cnpapers.com wrote:
From: Steve Campbell campbell@cnpapers.com Subject: [CentOS-virt] new to xen - got questions, please To: centos-virt@centos.org Date: Wednesday, June 16, 2010, 9:11 AM I just installed Centos 5.5 with the xen kernel on an older machine. It has Xeon processors and a 700 Mhz processor speed, so I realize I must use para-virtualized guests. Reading the Centos/RH Virtualization Guide gives examples of the process of installing guest hosts, but it only lists installing Windows as a fully-virtualized host.
Is that because they only showed those types of examples or is it that Windows hosts can't be para-virtualized?
Secondly, what's the normal what to install a Centos guest when it comes to defining the installation media (it lists HTTP, FTP, or NFS). This machine only has a CD drive, so I'm a little confused about the best way to handle this since the Centos installation now consists of 6 CDs. A brief explanation would be handy.
You want to boot into a PV install. The initrd.img and vmlinuz shown in the filelist below are the tools for this included on the first CD in the set.
------------------ locate netboot boot files ----------- tlviewer@ga-p45:~> sudo mount /data2/kvm/CentOS-5.5-i386-bin-1of7.iso /mnt/iso -o loop tlviewer@ga-p45:~> ls -al /mnt/iso/images/xen/ total 9573 drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 2048 2010-04-29 17:29 . drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 2048 2010-04-29 17:29 .. -rw-r--r-- 2 root root 7552658 2010-04-29 17:23 initrd.img -r--r--r-- 1 root root 441 2010-04-29 17:33 TRANS.TBL -rw-r--r-- 2 root root 2244980 2010-04-29 17:23 vmlinuz ------------------ snip -----------
copy the above 2 to a local dir
#cat cent55.py ------------------- cent55.py --------- kernel = 'vmlinuz' ramdisk = 'initrd.img'
name = "cent55" uuid = "442db20d-7a82-409b-b8aa-a352c1fe127c" maxmem = 512 memory = 512 vcpus = 2 #bootloader = "/usr/bin/pygrub" #bootargs = "-q" on_poweroff = "destroy" on_reboot = "restart" on_crash = "destroy" vfb = [ "type=vnc,vncunused=1,keymap=en-us" ] disk = [ "phy:/dev/maxvm/cent55,xvda,w" ] vif = [ "bridge=br0" ] extra = " install=http://mirrors.kernel.org/centos/5.5/os/i386/ console=tty0 console=ttyS0,38400n8 console=xvc0" ----------------- unsnip --------------
#xm create -c cent55.py
this will start an http PV install. AFAIK the boot files are netboot only and won't allow access to your CD as ISO or otherwise.
Before firstboot, comment out the kernel/ramdisk lines and uncomment the 2 pygrub lines.